

A thought-experiment about matter, space, and time. - pacohn
http://hubski.com/pub?id=837

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IsaacL
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.

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JoeAltmaier
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?

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pacohn
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.

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VaedaStrike
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!

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

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mikhailfranco
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_...](http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-
files/Barbour_The_Nature_of_Time.pdf)

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

~~~
markkat
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.

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miniatureape
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.

