hsf@hlexa.UUCP (Henry Friedman) (11/06/84)
Recently, a fellow netter and I were arguing whether the idea of time as a fourth dimension is merely a mathematical abstraction. Having just learned a very little about "gauge field symmetries", I speculated somewhat wildly: Someone will show that the symmetries are different for the particles in any system if "time passes" than if time is a continuum. A few weeks later, I was reading SUPERFORCE, by Paul Davies, and discovered I had apparently been right--but almost 100 years late! Davies writes that around the turn of the century, Heinrich Lorenz and Henri Poincare derived a symmetry from Maxwell's equations that showed that time had a spacelike component. This foreshadowed Einstein's special relativity and Minkowski's spacetime continuum. So I'll try my luck with another wild speculation: a hypertime of A SINGLE EVENT will be postulated by someone qualified to put it on a sound basis (which I can't). Such a hypertime (a timeless time, since with only one event, nothing changes) would provide a matrix for the spacetime continuum. Then we could truly say that in relation to that matrix, everything in ordinary time happens "all at once." The overall SUBJECTIVE effect would be as if time were a very long movie threaded, all at once, through an infinite number of movie projectors. Or put another way, as if an infinite number of wavecrests of awareness were passing through time (of course nothing REALLY would move). We are aware of only one of those movie projectors and one of those wavecrests. But you say that entropy proves that time flows. No, the arrow of time merely shows that time is not the same in both directions, not that it really flows. The "passing" of time is purely subjective. Of course, these ideas go all the way back to Parmenides and Zeno.