"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Unreality is that which, when you stop believing in it, comes to nothing."
> I wonder if you agree with Einstein's letter to a friend (Eugene Wigner?)
> that the passing of their ally, Michelle Besso, caused Einstein to remember
> that "time was merely an illusion, although a persistant one?"
> Mitch
Michele Besso died in march 15, 1955, four weeks before
Einstein's death. E. wrote to Vero and Bice Besso (on march 25):
"Now he has departed a little ahead of me from this quaint world.
This means nothing. For us faithful physicists, the separation
between past, present, and future has only the meaning of
an illusion, though a persistent one." [Einstein Archive, reel 7-245].
Einstein seems to have embraced Weyl's idea. An idea which
seriously conflicts with the Judeo & Christian tradition, which
assigns to time a very active role in history.
Weyl's idea was that "]T]he objective world simply *is*, it does not *happen*.
Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the lifeline
of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image
in space which continuosly changes in time." [H. Weyl, Philosophy of
Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton U.P., 1949, p. 116).
Clearly Weyl thought the Minkowski's 4-dimensional space-time as
a "block universe". But there is no cohesive global concept of past (of
what?) and future (of what?), imo. Because there are also flat spaces and,
perhaps, even closed time loops.
In the Timaeus [37c-38a] Plato described how the Demiurge - who was
eternal -sought to create an eternal universe.
"[T]o attach Eternity in its entirety to what is generated was impossible,
therefore He resolved to make a moving likeness of Eternity which abides
in unity. He made an eternal image, moving according to number, that
which we name 'time' "
Well, I prefer Plato.
Unfortunately this also brings lots of problems. In example J.T. Wilcox
[Relativity, Simultaneity, and Divine Omniscience, thesis, Atlanta, 1956]
wrote "How there can be divine knowledge of a relativistic universe?".
But the answer, now, is blowing in the wind.
-s.
Is there a real time ordering behind the nonlocal correlations?
Antoine Suarez
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110124
It is argued that recent experiments with moving beam-splitters demonstrate
that there is no real time ordering behind the nonlocal correlations:
In Bell's world there is no "before" and "after".
Quantum correlations versus Multisimultaneity: an experimental test
Andre Stefanov, Nicolas Gisin, Antoine Suarez, Hugo Zbinden
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110117
Multisimultaneity is a causal model of relativistic quantum physics
which assigns a real time ordering to any set of events,
much in the spirit of the pilot-wave picture. Contrary to standard
quantum mechanics, it predicts a disappearance of the correlations
in a Bell-type experiment when both analysers are in relative motion
such that, each one in its own inertial reference frame, is first to select
the output of the photons. We tested this prediction using acousto-optic
modulators as moving beam-splitters and interferometers separated by 55 m.
We didn't observe any disappearance of the correlations, thus refuting
Multisimultaneity.
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