From: matus (matus@matus1976.com)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 11:06:25 MDT
Perusing through an astronomy magazine I came across this article
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Time not quantized -
http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/219fcvov.a
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"...observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have shaken the idea that
time is quantized"
"If time is quantized like the energy of photons, there should be a
certain minimum measurable quanta of time, called a "Planck time" (named
after German physicist Max Planck, who originated the idea of quanta).
This also means that life, like a movie, may appear to be a continuum of
unfolding events but is really nothing more then a series of snapshots
that together define the past and future. One consequence of quantized
time is that the speed of light should not be measurable with a
precision better than one unit of Planck time, because time becomes
undefined or "blurry" at smaller intervals. If light is quantized, it
might have minute speed differences that we cannot measure. "
"If photons emitted from a source at the same instant have tiny speed
differences, the light waves will arrive at Earth with different phases.
Over short distances, these discrepancies aren't noticeable...Over large
distances, though, differences in the light become apparent"
"Astronomers Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman at the University of Alabama
in Huntsville used this idea to look for speed distribution in light
from galaxies billions of light-years away that were imaged by the
Hubble Space Telescope. If all photons are traveling from the galaxy at
the exact same speed then all the light waves will arrive in phase. When
they pass through a telescope's aperture, they interact with each other
to create a pattern of bright and dark rings "
"However, if the speeds are even the tiniest bit off, the light is not
in phase. These light waves align chaotically, and no pattern is formed.
Lieu and Hillman suspected that slight differences in the speed of
individual photons would cause their light waves to get out of sync over
great distances, preventing the Airy disk from forming. Much to their
surprise, the light was all in phase and an Airy disk appeared, implying
that time is not quantized"
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I found this quite surprising. Surprising, first of all, that time
might not be quantized, since space, energy, momentum all are. This
also has some implications to the last long identity debate I took part
in. In that debate, I asked if time was quantized in sync, in other
words, as all energy progressed through time, was it ALL simultaneously
created and destroyed, or did each sub atomic particle or quanta have
its own Planck time ruler. The implications are important, in the
former, the entire universe is created and destroyed at every instant of
time to the next, which would mean to me, no big deal if you teleport me
in a plank length of time. In the latter case, at any given instant of
time, that vast majority of the universe is a continuation from the
instant before, in which case by my definitions identity is preserved
through time, and teleportation would not constitute a continuation of
consciousness.
I also asked the question of the space-time quantization was an absolute
smallest scale of any part of the universe's existence, or if it was
merely the limit the laws of physics imposed on our observational
abilities. This article implies that the latter is the case. That even
though we can not measure any smaller than the plank length (or time)
that it non-theless exists, as in this experiment it would have
permitted small discrepancies in the speed of light, and caused the
light traveling great distance to be out of phase, and thus not cause
definitive interference patterns.
However, the existence of the interference patterns can imply 1) time is
not quantized OR 2) that small discrepancies can not arise in the speed
of the photons. This article is written in a manner that assumes 2 to
NOT be the case, and thus suggests that 1 is. Is this the generally
accepted view in physics?
Additionally, the existence of interference patterns could have still
occurred if time was quantized, but space-time did not actually exist in
any increments smaller than the plank length / time, thus making it
impossible for there to be speed variations. This researcher /article
obviously implies that time exists in intervals smaller, since it would
have direct measurable consequences. My next question would be, is this
established in the quantization of energy and space? Are there any
observational consequences of energy space existing in intervals smaller
than the plank intervals, and have these tests been conducted?
More to the point, if this article is correct, and these results are
found to be valid, then time is not quantized, and thus teleportation
could never considered to be anything other than a destructive copying
mechanism, and by my definitions will always result in there being no
continuation of consciousness.
In short, I was right, ppbbbbb! =)
Michael Dickey
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