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I call it “time” like everyone else! 😂

But I think in fullest understanding of physics long in the future, physicists will say time is not real. Same for gravity. They’re both rooted in human experience and its hard to comprehend a model without them.

All the galaxies that we observe don’t behave according to gravity, gravity is too weak to hold any galaxy together as it rotates, so people invented dark matter as a fudge to preserve the theory of gravity at galactic scale.

In our hearts we know gravity is not right, the same applies for time.

There is no universal reference for time, unlike energy which has the universal reference point of absolute zero.

Even the speed of light, which we think of as distance and time, is in reality means the photon just has a single energy level in its quantum field.

We have a Euclidian experience and all of our models are still anchored in that. It’s extremely difficult to escape because it requires tremendous abstraction.

A fish would have a lot of difficulty discovering / inventing fire. We have the same challenge trying to understand reality.

Picture below essentially shows Newtonian and Einsteinian limits. But there’s obviously more beyond this.

Jac 2y ago

I particularly enjoyed the fish and fire analogy.

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Discussion

HoloKat 2y ago

I’m not sure I understand it 🤔

For fish to discover fire it would need to look and function outside of its habitat. To me that seems to suggest our answers are outside of observable universe (which we really don’t know if that’s the case. We can only see what we can observe and it’s not helpful to say “oh, it’s probably just something we can’t ever observe because it’s outside our field of observation.

Unless you mean it more simply as in we may just never possess the capacity to understand it like ants trying to understand Shakespeare.

Dark matter is theorized to explain observable things like galaxies held together by some glue. It’s not just made up to fit the theory - it’s there for a reason. The same with gravity. We can observe gravitational lensing so we can speculate that the mass of an object warps space time, among many other ways of observing something - that we call gravity. It’s not “not real” or we wouldn’t have observed it.

That reminds me I was listening to a podcast episode on lex Friedman that was all about this topic. It was quite complex for me to grasp fully while I was doing chores; I should probably revisit it.

⚡️🌱🌙 2y ago

Dark matter has never been observed. Ever.

Mass and gravity doesn’t allow for the existence of galaxies, the math said galaxies should tear apart as they rotate, so science added a bunch of invisible / never observed mass to balance their equations. With this extra invisible mass, the math now says galaxies can exist.

That’s what dark matter is. That’s why it was hypothesised.

Dark matter is probably a bust theory, because the scientific method explicitly says not to add such (m+m.delta) fudge factors to your calcs, just to get the desired result. Especially if it requires adding something that has never been observed, ever. But dark matter hypothesis allows the rest of science to continue pretending gravity is real.

I know you asked about time, but I don’t think time is real, not how we understand it. Physics has the spacetime continuum now and there’s a nuance there that time is different in every location in space.

What that means is that time is more like temperate than a universal thing. Every point in space has its own time that is independent.

The older the universe gets the more scrambled up time becomes. Eg the core of planet Earth is today 2.5million years closer to the big bang than the Earth’s crust. This is also what entropy is (things becoming more disorderly), entropy is a law of thermodynamics and so its more robust a phenomenon than time. So it makes sense to try and think of time as behaving like entropy.

There is no universal time to travel back through, and entropy is irreversible.