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Velocity, we say, is a relative concept. That is, there is no meaning to the velocity of an object by itself: the only velocity that exists is the velocity of an object with respect to another object.
But if this is so, then the speed of light determined by Maxwell’s equations is velocity with respect to what?
Excellent Question, my first choice would be for quantum gravity.
Between the past and the future of an event (for example, between the past and the future for you, where you are, and in the precise moment in which you are reading), there exists an “intermediate zone,” an “extended present”;
This is the discovery made with special relativity.
duration of this “intermediate zone,”* which is neither in your past nor in your future, is very small and depends on where an event takes place rela...
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the greater the distance of the event from you, the longer the duration o...
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At a distance of a few meters from your nose, the duration of what for you is the “intermediate zone,” neither past nor future...
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(the number of nanoseconds in a second is the same as the number of seconds in thirty years).
WTF????!!!!!
This is much less than we could possibly notice.
On the other side of the ocean, the duration of this “intermediate zone” is a thousandth of a second, still well below the threshold of our perception of time, the minimum amount of time we perceive with our senses, which is somewhere on the order of a tenth of a second.
This is utterly fascinating! Curious If mindfullness awareness - perfected over many repititions - could actually precieve the energies in nanoseconds? Staggering to consider the math that states a nano second = 933,120,000 seconds puts the cosmos into perspective; relative to a meditation cushion in Brooklyn NY.
during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future. They are elsewhere. We had never before been aware of this “elsewhere” because next to us this “elsewhere” is too brief; we are not quick enough to notice it.
But it exists, and is real.
This is the eye of the needle in the bible and the Buddhist meditation Powa - the ejection of conciousness at death... or in christian terms, heaven; or in secular terms, eternity?
This quarter of an hour is time that is neither past nor future to the moment you’ve replied to me. The key fact that Einstein understood is that this quarter of an hour is inevitable: there is no way of reducing it. It is woven into the texture of the events of space and of time: we cannot abbreviate it, any more than we can send a letter to the past.
*
In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that “absolute simultaneity” does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist “now.”
The collection of all the events in the universe cannot be described as a succession of “nows,” of presents, one following the other; it has a more co...
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“spacetime”: the set of all past and future events, but also those that are “neither-past-nor-future”; these do not form a si...
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The fact that space and time are intimately connected, as in figure 3.2, implies a subtle restructuring of Newton’s mechanics, which Einstein rapidly completes in 1905 and 1906.
A first result of this restructuring is that as space and time fuse together in a single concept of spacetime, so the electric field and the magnetic fields fuse together in the same way, merging into a single entity that today we call the “electromagnetic field.”
This IS dependent origination... The very foundation of our interdependence with all of mother earth's energies. The simultanaity of both the fusing of spacetime and the electromagnetic 'field'... Is a big step for the mechanics of a mindfullness/awareness meditation discipline.
The concepts of “energy” and “mass” get combined in the same way as time and space, electric and magnetic fields are fused together, in the new mechanics.
Before 1905, two general principles appeared certain: conservation of mass, and conservation of energy.
But Einstein realizes that energy and mass are two facets of the same entity, just as the electric and magnetic fields are two facets of the same field, and as space and time are two facets of the one thing, spacetime.
This implies that mass, by itself, is not conserved; and energy—as it was conceived at the time—is not independently conserved, either.
One may be transformed into the other: only one single law of conservation exists, not two. What is conserved is the sum of mass and energy, not each separately. Processes must exist that transform energy into mass, or mass into energy.
Is this the same as the Godel's math therom that 1=0?
The result is the celebrated formula E=mc2. Since the speed of light, c, is a very large number, and c2 an even greater number, the energy obtained transforming one gram of mass is enormous; it is the energy of millions of bombs exploding at the same time—enough energy to illuminate a city and power the industries of a country for months, or, conversely, capable of destroying in a second hundreds of thousands of human beings in a city such as Hiroshima.
Mass times the speed of light squared... Is a circus number of like 90 billion km per second - or - a speed fast enough to make our Cosmos navigable. Is our consciousness if trained through mindfullness awareness capable of traveling at this speed... Is this the speed of our moment of death, when the final animating breath is exhaled out of our human lungs...
It depends on our choices, on which leaders we call upon to decide for us.
Ironically as I am reading this we are four months out from our 2024 Presidental election...
Time and space are different from the way they had been conceived since Newton. “Space” does not exist independently from time.
Our intuitive idea of the present, the ensemble of all events happening “now” in the universe, is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognize small temporal intervals.
These small intervals are the potential for bringinng counciousness into our nanoseconds?
The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion.
We imagined a flat Earth because of the limitatio...
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Had our brain and our senses been more precise, had we easily perceived time in nanoseconds, we would never have made up the idea of a “present” extending everywhere.
We would have easily recognized the existence of the intermediate zone between past and future.
The apparent contradiction between the equations of Maxwell and Newtonian physics were well-known, and no one knew how to resolve them.
The story goes that in the dimly lit old halls of Kraców University, an austere professor of physics came out of his study waving around Einstein’s article, screaming, “The new Archimedes is born!”
The theory of general relativity is the most beautiful theory produced by physics, and the first of the pillars of quantum gravity. It is at the heart of the narrative of this book. Here the real magic of twentieth-century physics begins.
But something troubles him: special relativity does not square with what was known about gravity.
Einstein, fascinated since adolescence by the electromagnetic field that pushed the rotors in his father’s power stations, begins to look into this “gravitational field,” and search for what kind of math could describe it.
Ten years of manic studies, attempts, mistakes, confusion, brilliant ideas, wrong ideas; a long series of articles published with incorrect equations; further mistakes and stress. Finally, in 1915, he commits to print an article containing the complete solution, which he names the “General Theory of Relativity”: his masterpiece.
Newton had returned to Democritus’s idea, according to which bodies move in space. This space had to be a large, empty container, a rigid box for the universe. An immense scaffolding in which objects run in straight lines, until a force causes them to curve.
But what is this “space,” which contains the world, made of? What is space?
How can there be at the same time something (space) and nothing? What is this “empty space” within which particles move? Is it something, or is it nothing? If it is nothing, it doesn’t exist, and we can do without it. If it is something, can it be true that its only property is to be there, doing nothing?
Democritus himself,
wrote that empty space is something “between being and non-being”: “Democritus postulated the full and the empty, calling one ‘Being,’ and the other ‘Non-Being,’” says Simplicius.1 Atoms are Being.
Space is “Non-Being.” A “Non-Being” that, nevertheless, exists. It is difficult to be more obscure than this.
Thus, Einstein addresses not one but two problems. First, how can we describe the gravitational field? Second, what is Newton’s space?
what if the gravitational field turned out actually to be Newton’s mysterious space? What if Newton’s space was nothing more than the gravitational field? This extremely simple, beautiful, brilliant idea is the theory of general relativity.
The world is not made up of space + particles + electromagnetic field + gravitational field. The world is made up of particles + fields, and nothing else; there is no need to add space as an extra ingredient.
It is a momentous simplification of the world. Space is no longer different from matter. It is one of the “material” components of the world, akin to the electromagnetic field. It is a real entity that undulates, fluctuates, bends, and contorts.
With a great deal of effort, seeking help from friends better versed in mathematics than himself, Einstein learns Riemann’s math—and writes an equation where R is proportional to the energy of matter.
In words: spacetime curves more where there is matter.
So out in space there is very little matter; as bodies of more dense matter begin to rotate at greater speeds, it is curious to me just how fast the atoms in our body spinning? If they are not spinning, does that mean ultimately, there is only waves of movemen, which suggests that particles are only relatively existent, while waves are the ultimate primordial energy?
