Newton prefaced his treatise on the laws of physics by saying it will be convenient to distinguish absolute and relative.
It seems to me, this type of thinking (distinguish absolute and relative) is the basis of a great deal of Pre-Socratic thought, as well as Plato’s view that our world of change and becoming emerges from an ultimate reality.
It seems to me that the Ancient Chinese and Indians had this figured out in various forms, the ultimate Way and the Way of mankind.
It seems to me Einstein and Heisenberg and Schopenhauer and all those guys believed relative space, and time are our measurements, and absolute space and time exist undetected beyond our experience.
It seems to me Hugh Everett devised a model where relative space and time and matter were measurement records created as a physical process by a physical observer defined in non-relative states.
So it seems to me, in 99% of all human thought in history in most cultures you can find the basic notion that you have to split reality into absolute and relative.
And it seems to me, around 1960, as the world tried to comprehend Relativity, it was taken that there is simply relative states and nothing else. As if that makes any sense. Like having up without down. We now have the relative ontology, which, what, appears out of nowhere?
No, it appears as the result of measurement, ala Everett.
What are the odds that all of humanity has been incorrect except the post-Einstein post-Everett crowd that exists right now?
It seems like you’re conflating different meanings of “relative” here. There are at least these three:
Relativity of space and/or time, as opposed to there being One True Coordinate System. What makes this a useful notion is that the laws of physics turn out to be unchanged under certain changes of coordinates, which suggests there’s no fact of the matter about which one is best.
The fact that different observers perceive things differently, either because they have different perspectives on the same underlying (“absolute”) reality or because reality is irreducibly subjective or whatever.
“Relative state” in Everett’s understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a part of the formalism whereby you can decompose the overall state of a system according to the state of some part of the system.
There’s an analogy between Everett’s notion of “relative state” and more general notions of subjectivity, perhaps, but no more. And there’s a bit of an analogy between Einstein-style relativity and more general notions of subjectivity, but again no more than that.
If you think there’s more going on than that, then I think you need to be more precise about it, which means engaging with the actual physics you’re appealing to at a deeper level than pointing to Everett’s thesis and saying “see, he uses the word ‘relative’”. Which perhaps you’re already doing, but so far it doesn’t look like it—so you might want to be clearer about it.
There’s a letter from Everett to De Witt stating as much
Stating that there are analogies between them. (I didn’t say or imply otherwise.)
[3:02] doesn’t exist in the universal wave function
Do you really mean that? Or do you mean something like “the universal wave function is a superposition of lots of things, many of which don’t have me seeing that the time is 3:02 at this point”?
It’s produced by my neural network.
What is? The position of the hands on the clock (in this branch of the wave function) is not produced by your neural network. Your experience of seeing the hands as you do is produced by your neural network (I’m not sure, by the way, what the advantage is of “neural network” over “brain”).
the relative space and time of Einstein’s Relativity are the measurement records in Everett’s Relative State formulation.
On what grounds do you make that claim?
What part is the problem?
The two bits I’ve asked questions above are candidates, if you insist on locating “the problem” specifically at one stage in your account of someone looking at a clock. But more generally the problem is that you seem (rightly or not) to be making grandiose—though rather unclear—claims about “relativity” without distinguishing clearly between the different meanings of that word.
o you really mean that? Or do you mean something like “the universal wave function is a superposition of lots of things, many of which don’t have me seeing that the time is 3:02 at this point”?
Yes. 3:02, 3 hours and 2 minutes past noon, is a human construct.
The universe could care less.
All the universe does is (presumably) calculate its next state based on its last.
If in that process humans evolve and invent clocks and give meaning to things like “noon” and “hour”, then those are taken to be as emergent in the secondary ontology defined by the neural network of the human.
If a comet knocked Earth out of orbit and into the sun, 3:02 would cease to have any meaning whatsoever.
It’s produced by my neural network.
What is?
Relative time.
the relative space and time of Einstein’s Relativity are the measurement records in Everett’s Relative State formulation.
On what grounds do you make that claim?
Ok, let’s try this. Which author wrote “relative time is a measurement determined by the senses.”?
3 hours and 2 minutes past noon is a human construct.
Sure. But the positioning of the hands on the clock isn’t; the pattern of bits in a computer’s memory isn’t; etc. What actual content-ful claim are you making here?
Relative time.
It feels as if you’re deliberately avoiding making any statement unambiguous enough to be definitely true or false. “Relative time” can mean lots of things. For example: suppose I pick out two events and say they’re a year apart. Of course the word “year” is a product of human culture. But the fact that between one event and another the planet we call earth made approximately one revolution around the star we call the sun is not a product of human culture.
OK, let’s try this.
Why? I mean, suppose I guess wrong, and suppose it isn’t just because I’m an idiot. Does the fact that there’s a sentence with the term “relative time” in it that could plausibly have been written by either Einstein or Wheeler somehow prove your claim? I don’t see how it does.
For what it’s worth: I haven’t checked, but it sounds distinctly more like Einstein than like Wheeler to me. But I remark that one could write an entire textbook on relativity without any need to appeal to “measurements determined by the senses” as such.
[EDITED to add: According to Some Guy On The Internet, it was actually written by Isaac Newton. How anything written by Newton could possibly tell us whether Einstein and Everett were referring to the same thing, I have no idea. I can’t find those exact words in Newton, but there’s something a bit like it towards the start of the Principia, contrasting with the famous bit about absolute time flowing equably without regard to any thing external.]
[EDITED again much later to say: Oops, I just noticed that for some reason I wrote “Wheeler” where I meant “Everett”. Dunno why. My apologies if this caused any confusion. Since the quotation—if it was actually a correct question, which seems in doubt—was actually from Newton, I don’t think it matters too much.]
The claim is that relative time is a measurement determined by the senses, based on change.
That’s explictly what Newton defined it as, but I’m pretty sure it was understood since before Plato and into modern times including Einstein and Everett.
The trouble is that that statement—which you are repeatedly restating in pretty much exactly the same words, which obviously isn’t going to clarify anything—is ambiguous.
If I take seriously “determined by the senses” then it seems you’re saying, e.g., that if we carry out some physical experiment in which no actual sentient observers are in relative motion then we won’t see the effects of relativity. Obviously it’s easy to test that by a suitable arrangement of, say, atomic clocks and recording equipment, and I think we all know what the outcome will be, and it isn’t one that makes Einsteinian relativity dependent on anyone’s senses.
On the other hand, if you’re not saying that then this has (again) a whiff of the “But I tell you the sun really does rise in the east!” about it. What is it that you think anyone disagrees with?
(For instance: Suppose I say that to give “relative time” a precise meaning we should take it to mean “proper time”, and that proper time could be defined as what someone moving along a given trajectory and observing (say) oscillating caesium atoms would measure. If I say that, am I agreeing with your statement about relative time? Because it seems to me that’s something plenty of physicists would say, and I don’t see why you’re presenting it as something bravely controversial that no one believes any more.)
My point is, for the history of human thought, the great rationalists made a distinction between absolute and relative. From the Greek Monists to Einstein and Everett. About 1960 that tradition mistakingly came to end.
It seems to me that the tradition of distinguishing between degrees of relative-ness is still alive and well. Why do you consider that insufficient? What harm do you think is done by avoiding the term “absolute”?
(I don’t know whether it’s actually true that no one calls things absolute any more. But I’m assuming it is for the sake of argument.)
I’m talking about up. And down. Up and down. Up and down have their meaning in each other.
Likewise, in reality, there is the relative side of the coin, and the absolute side of the coin.
The absolute reality is reality pre-measurement. It’s just what it is. No human concepts.
Now, when you place an observer in the absolute reality, the observer doesn’t change absolute into relative. But rather, the observer’s neural network creates an emergent set of information, a new ontology and that’s where relative space and time exist.
In which case I must reiterate that this has basically nothing to do with Einsteinian relativity, and rather little to do with Everett’s relative state formulation of QM either.
So you’re saying, the idea that measurement produces relative space and time, is unrelated to both Einstein and Everett?
Oh boy.
Clearly, this forum is not for me.
I will leave you with this:
“But you don’t seriously believe,” Einstein protested, “that none but
observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?”
“Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?” I asked in
some surprise. “After all, you did stress the fact that it is
impermissible to speak of absolute time, simply because absolute time
cannot be observed; that only clock readings, be it in the moving
reference system or the system at rest, are relevant to the
determination of time.”
“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning,” Einstein admitted, “but
it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more
diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep
in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite
wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In
reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides
what we can observe.”
(In ‘Physics and Beyond—Encounters and Conversations’, Harper
Torchbooks, 1972, p. 63. by Heisenberg)
The theory decides what we observe. That sentence encompasses what it means to be a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist (the senses determine what is observed).
You know, the most you can conclude here is that at least two people (me and whoever’s been up voting many of my comments—of course actually that could be a sockpuppet, but as it happens it’s not) hold an opinion you think is silly. But if that’s enough to make you decide that LW as a whole isn’t for you, I suppose it’s your choice.
Anyway: no, the thing I’m saying is basically unrelated to both Einsteinian relativity and Everettian relative state is not quite “the idea that measurement produces relative space and time” but this:
Now, when you place an observer in the absolute reality, the observer doesn’t change absolute into relative. But rather, the observer’s neural network creates an emergent set of information, a new ontology and that’s where relative space and time exist.
which goes further and is correspondingly less likely to be right. (E.g., because in place of the rather broad term ” measurement” you’ve got that stuff about the observer’s neutral network.)
The theory decides what we observe.
Did you notice that that isn’t actually what the quotation says? Theories constrain observation; they don’t determine it.
a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist
The word “rationalist” has multiple senses, and the way it’s usually used here is not as the opposite of “empiricist”.
“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning,” Einstein admitted, “but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”
No, I’m telling you, with a straight face, that “theories don’t determine observation” is consistent with, and “theories constrain observation” is simply a restatement of, what Einstein actually said, namely
It is the theory which decides what we can observe
as opposed to the completely different thing you wrote, namely
The theory decides what we observe.
(In case it’s necessary to spell it out: the important difference is the omission of the word “can” in your version.)
I think deleting my account might be needed.
Once again, let me remind you that however crazy you think I am I am only one of many many people here. You are of course free to delete your account if you can’t cope with the existence of one person who holds positions you think are crazy, but it seems like an odd choice.
(I think this is the fourth time you’ve said in this discussion that this isn’t the place for you. It seems almost as if you think you’re making a threat that will change someone’s behaviour. It’s maybe worth saying explicitly that that’s unlikely. You may stay or go as you please. But I hope that if you decide to leave you’ll do so for better reasons than encountering one person who disagrees with you, and that if you decide to stay you’ll come to realise that you’re not a lone voice of sanity among a crowd of idiots as it currently looks to me as if you think you are.)
[EDITED to add: when I say “what Einstein actually said” I should strictly say “what you say a book says Heisenberg says Einstein actually said”. I haven’t checked any of the links in that chain for myself. But it seems like something Einstein might plausibly have said.]
Gjm made the point that you are conflating diferent notions of “relative” so I’m not going to address that and will focus on other issues.
Even supposing this is true, why does it matter?
What are the odds they were all wrong?
Until the end of the 19th century, everyone thought that the world had absolute Euclidean space. Up until Cantor, everyone thought that there was only one size of infinity. Up until the 1930s no one thought that atoms could not be split. Up until the early 1600s most people thought that the planets and moons were made of fundamentally different materials than what was on planet Earth.
The fact that something was believed in some form for a long time is not strong evidence. That’s especially the case when the different notions in question are similar but not identical ideas.
In general, for scientific matters, the most recent views are more likely to be correct than earlier views, especially when the early views rely heavily on basic human intuitions.
That’s distinct from the fact that you are combining a wide variety of different ideas as connected when they aren’t.
What are the odds they were all wrong?
Here’s the facts as I see them.
Newton prefaced his treatise on the laws of physics by saying it will be convenient to distinguish absolute and relative.
It seems to me, this type of thinking (distinguish absolute and relative) is the basis of a great deal of Pre-Socratic thought, as well as Plato’s view that our world of change and becoming emerges from an ultimate reality.
It seems to me that the Ancient Chinese and Indians had this figured out in various forms, the ultimate Way and the Way of mankind.
It seems to me Einstein and Heisenberg and Schopenhauer and all those guys believed relative space, and time are our measurements, and absolute space and time exist undetected beyond our experience.
It seems to me Hugh Everett devised a model where relative space and time and matter were measurement records created as a physical process by a physical observer defined in non-relative states.
So it seems to me, in 99% of all human thought in history in most cultures you can find the basic notion that you have to split reality into absolute and relative.
And it seems to me, around 1960, as the world tried to comprehend Relativity, it was taken that there is simply relative states and nothing else. As if that makes any sense. Like having up without down. We now have the relative ontology, which, what, appears out of nowhere?
No, it appears as the result of measurement, ala Everett.
What are the odds that all of humanity has been incorrect except the post-Einstein post-Everett crowd that exists right now?
It seems like you’re conflating different meanings of “relative” here. There are at least these three:
Relativity of space and/or time, as opposed to there being One True Coordinate System. What makes this a useful notion is that the laws of physics turn out to be unchanged under certain changes of coordinates, which suggests there’s no fact of the matter about which one is best.
The fact that different observers perceive things differently, either because they have different perspectives on the same underlying (“absolute”) reality or because reality is irreducibly subjective or whatever.
“Relative state” in Everett’s understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a part of the formalism whereby you can decompose the overall state of a system according to the state of some part of the system.
There’s an analogy between Everett’s notion of “relative state” and more general notions of subjectivity, perhaps, but no more. And there’s a bit of an analogy between Einstein-style relativity and more general notions of subjectivity, but again no more than that.
If you think there’s more going on than that, then I think you need to be more precise about it, which means engaging with the actual physics you’re appealing to at a deeper level than pointing to Everett’s thesis and saying “see, he uses the word ‘relative’”. Which perhaps you’re already doing, but so far it doesn’t look like it—so you might want to be clearer about it.
Einstein’s Relativity and Everett’s Relative States seemed to be more than superfiically linked.
There’s a letter from Evertt to DeWitt stating as much
So, let’s say I look at a clock, it is 3:02 PM.
It is my contention that 3:02 PM is the objective time, and that is relative time.
It is my contention, that 3:02 PM exists in my neural network after I look at clock.
That there is no 3:02 PM in the source code for reality, ie, it doesn’t exist in the universal wave function.
It’s produced by my neural network.
No, in Everett’s model, 3:02 PM exists a measurement record in my neural network.
And that the relative space and time of Einstein’s Relativity are the measurement records in Everett’s Relative State Formulation.
What part is the problem?
Stating that there are analogies between them. (I didn’t say or imply otherwise.)
Do you really mean that? Or do you mean something like “the universal wave function is a superposition of lots of things, many of which don’t have me seeing that the time is 3:02 at this point”?
What is? The position of the hands on the clock (in this branch of the wave function) is not produced by your neural network. Your experience of seeing the hands as you do is produced by your neural network (I’m not sure, by the way, what the advantage is of “neural network” over “brain”).
On what grounds do you make that claim?
The two bits I’ve asked questions above are candidates, if you insist on locating “the problem” specifically at one stage in your account of someone looking at a clock. But more generally the problem is that you seem (rightly or not) to be making grandiose—though rather unclear—claims about “relativity” without distinguishing clearly between the different meanings of that word.
Yes. 3:02, 3 hours and 2 minutes past noon, is a human construct.
The universe could care less.
All the universe does is (presumably) calculate its next state based on its last.
If in that process humans evolve and invent clocks and give meaning to things like “noon” and “hour”, then those are taken to be as emergent in the secondary ontology defined by the neural network of the human.
If a comet knocked Earth out of orbit and into the sun, 3:02 would cease to have any meaning whatsoever.
Relative time.
Ok, let’s try this. Which author wrote “relative time is a measurement determined by the senses.”?
Sure. But the positioning of the hands on the clock isn’t; the pattern of bits in a computer’s memory isn’t; etc. What actual content-ful claim are you making here?
It feels as if you’re deliberately avoiding making any statement unambiguous enough to be definitely true or false. “Relative time” can mean lots of things. For example: suppose I pick out two events and say they’re a year apart. Of course the word “year” is a product of human culture. But the fact that between one event and another the planet we call earth made approximately one revolution around the star we call the sun is not a product of human culture.
Why? I mean, suppose I guess wrong, and suppose it isn’t just because I’m an idiot. Does the fact that there’s a sentence with the term “relative time” in it that could plausibly have been written by either Einstein or Wheeler somehow prove your claim? I don’t see how it does.
For what it’s worth: I haven’t checked, but it sounds distinctly more like Einstein than like Wheeler to me. But I remark that one could write an entire textbook on relativity without any need to appeal to “measurements determined by the senses” as such.
[EDITED to add: According to Some Guy On The Internet, it was actually written by Isaac Newton. How anything written by Newton could possibly tell us whether Einstein and Everett were referring to the same thing, I have no idea. I can’t find those exact words in Newton, but there’s something a bit like it towards the start of the Principia, contrasting with the famous bit about absolute time flowing equably without regard to any thing external.]
[EDITED again much later to say: Oops, I just noticed that for some reason I wrote “Wheeler” where I meant “Everett”. Dunno why. My apologies if this caused any confusion. Since the quotation—if it was actually a correct question, which seems in doubt—was actually from Newton, I don’t think it matters too much.]
Einstein, Everett, Newton, and basically every great thinker prior to 1960 all thought relative time was a measurment.
The fact that anyone would even dream that this is a controversial claim, speaks to how messed up our contemporary understanding of reality is.
I’m still trying to find out exactly what claim you think it is, whether controversial or not.
The claim is that relative time is a measurement determined by the senses, based on change.
That’s explictly what Newton defined it as, but I’m pretty sure it was understood since before Plato and into modern times including Einstein and Everett.
The trouble is that that statement—which you are repeatedly restating in pretty much exactly the same words, which obviously isn’t going to clarify anything—is ambiguous.
If I take seriously “determined by the senses” then it seems you’re saying, e.g., that if we carry out some physical experiment in which no actual sentient observers are in relative motion then we won’t see the effects of relativity. Obviously it’s easy to test that by a suitable arrangement of, say, atomic clocks and recording equipment, and I think we all know what the outcome will be, and it isn’t one that makes Einsteinian relativity dependent on anyone’s senses.
On the other hand, if you’re not saying that then this has (again) a whiff of the “But I tell you the sun really does rise in the east!” about it. What is it that you think anyone disagrees with?
(For instance: Suppose I say that to give “relative time” a precise meaning we should take it to mean “proper time”, and that proper time could be defined as what someone moving along a given trajectory and observing (say) oscillating caesium atoms would measure. If I say that, am I agreeing with your statement about relative time? Because it seems to me that’s something plenty of physicists would say, and I don’t see why you’re presenting it as something bravely controversial that no one believes any more.)
It was a trick question, sorry.
Newton wrote that.
My point is, for the history of human thought, the great rationalists made a distinction between absolute and relative. From the Greek Monists to Einstein and Everett. About 1960 that tradition mistakingly came to end.
It seems to me that the tradition of distinguishing between degrees of relative-ness is still alive and well. Why do you consider that insufficient? What harm do you think is done by avoiding the term “absolute”?
(I don’t know whether it’s actually true that no one calls things absolute any more. But I’m assuming it is for the sake of argument.)
Degrees of relative-ness?
Does that mean like, degress of “up-ness”?
I’m not talking about degrees of upness.
I’m talking about up. And down. Up and down. Up and down have their meaning in each other.
Likewise, in reality, there is the relative side of the coin, and the absolute side of the coin.
The absolute reality is reality pre-measurement. It’s just what it is. No human concepts.
Now, when you place an observer in the absolute reality, the observer doesn’t change absolute into relative. But rather, the observer’s neural network creates an emergent set of information, a new ontology and that’s where relative space and time exist.
In which case I must reiterate that this has basically nothing to do with Einsteinian relativity, and rather little to do with Everett’s relative state formulation of QM either.
So you’re saying, the idea that measurement produces relative space and time, is unrelated to both Einstein and Everett?
Oh boy.
Clearly, this forum is not for me.
I will leave you with this:
“But you don’t seriously believe,” Einstein protested, “that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?”
“Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?” I asked in some surprise. “After all, you did stress the fact that it is impermissible to speak of absolute time, simply because absolute time cannot be observed; that only clock readings, be it in the moving reference system or the system at rest, are relevant to the determination of time.”
“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning,” Einstein admitted, “but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”
(In ‘Physics and Beyond—Encounters and Conversations’, Harper Torchbooks, 1972, p. 63. by Heisenberg)
The theory decides what we observe. That sentence encompasses what it means to be a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist (the senses determine what is observed).
You know, the most you can conclude here is that at least two people (me and whoever’s been up voting many of my comments—of course actually that could be a sockpuppet, but as it happens it’s not) hold an opinion you think is silly. But if that’s enough to make you decide that LW as a whole isn’t for you, I suppose it’s your choice.
Anyway: no, the thing I’m saying is basically unrelated to both Einsteinian relativity and Everettian relative state is not quite “the idea that measurement produces relative space and time” but this:
which goes further and is correspondingly less likely to be right. (E.g., because in place of the rather broad term ” measurement” you’ve got that stuff about the observer’s neutral network.)
Did you notice that that isn’t actually what the quotation says? Theories constrain observation; they don’t determine it.
The word “rationalist” has multiple senses, and the way it’s usually used here is not as the opposite of “empiricist”.
Last sentence.
You read that, and you think “wrong!”
This is not a place for me.
And yet, what I wrote was:
which, you might notice, is actually agreeing with the sentence in question.
Ok, let’s get this straight. The quote, word for word is:
It is the theory which decides what we can observe.
Which I summarized as:
The theory decides what we observe.
And your response was:
Did you notice that that isn’t actually what the quotation says? Theories constrain observation; they don’t determine it.
And now you’re telling me, with a staight face “theories don’t determine observation” is in agreement with “the theory decides what we observe”?
Wowza. Ok. I think deleting my account might be needed.
No, I’m telling you, with a straight face, that “theories don’t determine observation” is consistent with, and “theories constrain observation” is simply a restatement of, what Einstein actually said, namely
as opposed to the completely different thing you wrote, namely
(In case it’s necessary to spell it out: the important difference is the omission of the word “can” in your version.)
Once again, let me remind you that however crazy you think I am I am only one of many many people here. You are of course free to delete your account if you can’t cope with the existence of one person who holds positions you think are crazy, but it seems like an odd choice.
(I think this is the fourth time you’ve said in this discussion that this isn’t the place for you. It seems almost as if you think you’re making a threat that will change someone’s behaviour. It’s maybe worth saying explicitly that that’s unlikely. You may stay or go as you please. But I hope that if you decide to leave you’ll do so for better reasons than encountering one person who disagrees with you, and that if you decide to stay you’ll come to realise that you’re not a lone voice of sanity among a crowd of idiots as it currently looks to me as if you think you are.)
[EDITED to add: when I say “what Einstein actually said” I should strictly say “what you say a book says Heisenberg says Einstein actually said”. I haven’t checked any of the links in that chain for myself. But it seems like something Einstein might plausibly have said.]
Gjm made the point that you are conflating diferent notions of “relative” so I’m not going to address that and will focus on other issues.
Until the end of the 19th century, everyone thought that the world had absolute Euclidean space. Up until Cantor, everyone thought that there was only one size of infinity. Up until the 1930s no one thought that atoms could not be split. Up until the early 1600s most people thought that the planets and moons were made of fundamentally different materials than what was on planet Earth.
The fact that something was believed in some form for a long time is not strong evidence. That’s especially the case when the different notions in question are similar but not identical ideas.
In general, for scientific matters, the most recent views are more likely to be correct than earlier views, especially when the early views rely heavily on basic human intuitions.
That’s distinct from the fact that you are combining a wide variety of different ideas as connected when they aren’t.