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Einstein's block universe?

lostone said:
I don't think a Block Universe implies the existence of a God at all. IMO, it simply means that something has always existed.
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As counterintuitive as such an idea seems to most of us that would definitely be the logical conclusion based on observation. We've been conditioned all our lives with semantic inaccuracies so it's understandable. Words are labels and labels are good ways to communicate but labels aren't the final word.

Sometimes I think there's a mathematical way to equate time with motion in the same way Einstein equated matter with energy.
 
Physicists are reduced to guessing, but they publish a lot of books with their guesses. It's an income enhancer.

My best guess is that we don't know, and may never know. I have some guesses that I am more fond of than others, and the Block Universe is one of them. Everett's many Universe idea still has virtues. It all comes down to how we view the collapse of the Wave Function. I confess that I still struggle with such basic math as tensor calculus, so the math of QM and GR is over my head, albeit I can almost understand it. Which means that my opinions are only a layman's opinions, and not to be taken too seriously.

When, in some moods, I invoke the God guess, it is of a drunk God or an idiot God like Lovecraft's Azazoth. In which case, one might ask, the great cosmic Waiter, 'this is not what I ordered'. I'll hold on the tip.

IMO, equating time with motion is also equating time with distance, as snap shots, during which none of our pictures can can get faster than the Planck Time over the Planck Distance.
 
A wave function can be written to describe the probability vs time of the orientation of a tossed coin. When the coin sops on the ground the wave function has collapsed into a measurable state. The probability of heads or tails has gone to n actual state.

Collapse is a bad choice of words as is 'imaginary numbers'.

The solution to the wave equation for a rectangular box potential well are sines and cosines. You cn look at an infinite potential well and barrier as a perfect lossless mirror.

A gas laser ids a potential well. Photons bounce back and forth between mirrors at the end. When the length of the box is a multiple of the photon wavelength resonance occurs, like a tuning fork ringing or an acoustic resonance..

The wave function describes the probability of a photon at an xyz position vs time. For a large number of photons the distributing becomes a sinusoidal amplitude wave across the box. When measuring a photon the wave function collapse's from a probability into a known state.

In the 90s I took a night class in modern physics. It was a bit anti climatic. The principles are actually basic with different terminology.
 
excreationist said:
Apparently Einstein believed in a block universe where the past and future exist eternally and are inevitable.

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time

"The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...eory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386

This might be compatible with how people think God relates to the universe.

What do people think of that idea?
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The block universe is simply a metaphorical way of imagining ... well, I'm not quite sure what. But it is not something that actually exists anywhere in empirical reality.

Time is the distance between events.

Events are changes in what things currently are, where they are, and what they are doing.

There is basically one set of "stuff", consisting of all "things", and it is constantly in motion and transformation from one form to another. (A transformation would include things like the accumulation of matter into a super-dense black hole and its explosion into a fresh universe).

Time travel is impossible, because it requires putting every thing back to where it was, and how it was, before. And, considering that our Earth is both spinning and orbiting the Sun, and that our solar system is moving through our galaxy, and that our galaxy is moving through space, it turns out that trying to put things back where they were is not a realistic possibility.

The only "block" is the whole set of stuff. There is no room for the whole set of stuff to exist in all of its configurations simultaneously. Even with infinity, there would be no room for that. :)
 
Reasonable, but I find the whole issue confusing, so my opinion swings back and forth, and I am sure that the next reasonable take I find on it will swing me some other direction. The whole business of 'existence' versus 'nothing' is a philosophical quagmire.
 
lostone said:
Reasonable, but I find the whole issue confusing, so my opinion swings back and forth, and I am sure that the next reasonable take I find on it will swing me some other direction. The whole business of 'existence' versus 'nothing' is a philosophical quagmire.
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Oh, well that's a different question. And it is a type of question that cannot be answered. The question, "Why is there something rather than nothingness?", falls into the general category of "Why are things as they are rather than something different?" And I don't think those questions can ever be answered by anything other than, "Because that's just the way it is".
 
Block time is a perfectly good model of reality. It simply adds time as a dimension to the three familiar spatial dimensions, in which 'blocks' are a commonplace.

As three dimensional beings flowing through a fourth dimension over which we have neither control nor surveillance, it's not particularly useful. It does seem to suggest that both past and future are immutable, rendering time travel if not impossible, then certainly futile.

Travel in time is likely impossible regardless of whether or not spacetime can correctly be modelled as a static object in some higher dimension. Such a model doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but neither does it seem very helpful towards either understanding or altering our reality.

Unless Asimov's work on the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimolene were to be replicated.
 
Would not all the near infinite configurations of matter/energy, galaxies, stars planets, etc - the sheer mass and gravity of a block universe - be detectable?
 
DBT said:
Would not all the near infinite configurations of matter/energy, galaxies, stars planets, etc - the sheer mass and gravity of a block universe - be detectable?
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A block universe is just a single universe with (at least) four dimensions - three spatial, and one of time - wherein time is dependent on the relative motion of the observer, as described by Relativity.

In Einstein's universe, observers moving at different rates agree on the speed of light, but disagree about the timing, and even the sequence, of events they observe.

This apparent paradox - that events can occur in different orders for different observers - can be resolved by discarding the concept of a single and universal 'now'; 'Now' ceases to be special or different from 'then', as your 'now' might be in my past, or my future.

The way Einstein envisaged this was to to model spacetime as an unchanging four dimensional 'block', through which each observer's 'now' constitutes a slice that moves through the time dimension at an angle that is dependent on their motion.

The 'sheer mass and gravity' of this block universe is the observation that (General) Relativity seeks to explain - by invoking a block universe Einstein was able to correctly model the observed motions of objects in space, where Newton's model has inaccuracies.

So the answer to your question is 'Yes, and it is'. At least according to Einstein.

The absolute nature of the speed of light (ie that it is the same for all observers) implies that events in your future are, from the perspective of some hypothetical observers, events in their past and vice versa.

This is, of course, incompatible with the idea that the future is not yet fixed, but the past is immutable; Einstein's block universe model resolves that by making the future as immutable as the past, because for some observers what you call 'the future' has already happened.
 
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