A thought-experiment about matter, space, and time. | Hacker News Reader

A thought-experiment about matter, space, and time.

hubski.com

25 pointspacohn10 comments

My first thought is "OK, now put down the bong".

More constructively, while I too enjoy amateur philosophy, I think the further you stray into actual physics the greater your chances of saying something provably nonsensical.

Was my exact sentiment too. I want the two minutes of my life back.

Seems like nonsense - always does when you resort to first principles.

I like to wonder, how do we know space is expanding? When particles get further apart, do they also grow in size? Then how would we know they are further apart? The entire system got bigger, including the ruler.

I know, we measure light and that's the ruler. So light doesn't expand too?

As far as I know, the evidence of expansion has everything to do with light. It's the Doppler effect. There is an apparent red shift (expansion of wavelengths) if you are moving away from the source, and a blue shift (compression of wavelengths) if you are moving towards the source. We see everything around us as red shifted, so it looks like we are raisins in a loaf of expanding bread. All raisins are moving away from each other, or the space in between raisins is expanding.

I don't think the second part of your comment was any more constructive. Even if you don't agree with the basis or the the conclusions, there is value in these kinds of exercises. At the very least, it might give someone new perspective on their own ideas. Someone might stumble upon something useful.

IMO as long as we can't explain one of the most important forces that we experience, I don't think we should so casually dismiss these kinds of pursuits.

I wish I had more time to look at this right now. This is so very much in sync with so many of my sleepless nights thinking oh so very too much about relational database design theory and how it relates to the whole of existence.

Even though I've not done more than to read a couple of paragraphs it's a veeeeery cool post! very cool post indeed!

This reminds me of Mach's Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle

Yes, that is where it all started, but there is ongoing development of the relational view. For example, in this essay Julian Barbour derives an expression for time in terms of positions:

http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Barbour_The_Nature_...

And here is David Mermin's "Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", otherwise known as the "Zero Worlds" hypothesis (to contrast to the more famous "Many Worlds"), because it is entirely relational:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801057

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609013

Mik

Thanks for pointing these out mikhailfranco and arethuza. I'm the author of the linked post. I'll be giving them a read.

Just scanning them now, I think they will be very helpful.

Given what definition of space? Newton, for one, would not agree with many of your premises, such as the fact that distance is a matter only of relations. And he may have been proven "wrong," but there was a significant amount of theory between Plato and now that you might not want to shuffle under the carpet.

But I should add that I'm no expert myself.

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