Hi there community! My name is Dave. Currently hailing from the front range in Colorado, I moved out here after 5 years with a Chicago non-profit—half as executive director—following a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (four years after being diagnosed with ADHD-I). That was three years ago. Much has happened in the interim, but long story short, I mercilessly began studying what we call AS & anything related I could find. After a particularly brutal first-time experience with hardcore passive-aggressivism (always two sides to every situation, but it doesn’t work well when no one will talk about it :P), I became extremely isolated, & have been now for about a year. I’m in my second attempt to return to school via a great community college, but unfortunately the same difficulties as last term are getting in the way.
BUT, that’s a different story! I’ve had this site recommended to me a few times now because over the course of my isolation I’ve become completely preoccupied with all sorts of fun mental projects, ranging in topics from physics to consciousness to quantum mechanics to dance. My current big projects (I bounce around a loooooot) are creating a linear model for the evolution of cognitive development & showing in some way why I’m not sure i agree that time is the fourth dimension. Oh, also trying to develop a structure for understanding :)
After looking through a few of the welcome threads here, I’m excited to be here! Now all I have to do is keep consistent...
Hello and welcome to lesswrong, your goal to understanding time as the 4th dimension stuck out to me in that it reminded me of a post that i found beautiful and insightful while contemplating the same thing. timeless physics has a certain beauty to it that resonates to me much better then 4th dimensional time and sounds like something you would appreciate.
Sure does, but don’t let yourself get tempted by the Dark Side. Beauty is not enough, it’s the ability to make testable predictions that really matters. And Eliezer’s two favorite pets, timeless physics and many worlds, fail miserably by this metric. Maybe some day they will be a stepping stone to something both beautiful and accurate.
You have a very good point and have shown me something that I knew better and will have to keep an eye on closer for now on.
That being said Beauty is not enough to be accepted into any realm of science but thinking about beautiful concepts such as timeless physics could increase the probability of thinking up an original testable theory that is true.
In particular I’m thinking how the notion of absolute time slowed down the discovery of relativity while if someone were to contemplate the beautiful notion of relative time, relativity could have been found much faster.
Hi there community! My name is Dave. Currently hailing from the front range in Colorado, I moved out here after 5 years with a Chicago non-profit—half as executive director—following a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (four years after being diagnosed with ADHD-I). That was three years ago. Much has happened in the interim, but long story short, I mercilessly began studying what we call AS & anything related I could find. After a particularly brutal first-time experience with hardcore passive-aggressivism (always two sides to every situation, but it doesn’t work well when no one will talk about it :P), I became extremely isolated, & have been now for about a year. I’m in my second attempt to return to school via a great community college, but unfortunately the same difficulties as last term are getting in the way.
BUT, that’s a different story! I’ve had this site recommended to me a few times now because over the course of my isolation I’ve become completely preoccupied with all sorts of fun mental projects, ranging in topics from physics to consciousness to quantum mechanics to dance. My current big projects (I bounce around a loooooot) are creating a linear model for the evolution of cognitive development & showing in some way why I’m not sure i agree that time is the fourth dimension. Oh, also trying to develop a structure for understanding :)
After looking through a few of the welcome threads here, I’m excited to be here! Now all I have to do is keep consistent...
As long as you frame it as a question about your understanding of relativity, and about the validity of the relativity theory itself, sure, why not.
Hello and welcome to lesswrong, your goal to understanding time as the 4th dimension stuck out to me in that it reminded me of a post that i found beautiful and insightful while contemplating the same thing. timeless physics has a certain beauty to it that resonates to me much better then 4th dimensional time and sounds like something you would appreciate.
Sure does, but don’t let yourself get tempted by the Dark Side. Beauty is not enough, it’s the ability to make testable predictions that really matters. And Eliezer’s two favorite pets, timeless physics and many worlds, fail miserably by this metric. Maybe some day they will be a stepping stone to something both beautiful and accurate.
You have a very good point and have shown me something that I knew better and will have to keep an eye on closer for now on.
That being said Beauty is not enough to be accepted into any realm of science but thinking about beautiful concepts such as timeless physics could increase the probability of thinking up an original testable theory that is true.
In particular I’m thinking how the notion of absolute time slowed down the discovery of relativity while if someone were to contemplate the beautiful notion of relative time, relativity could have been found much faster.