Just so we're clear, there is no real physics in this talk. There is no information in this talk.
It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd. Physics is in fact independent of the actual value of the speed of light.
The idea that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in all reference frames is a postulate of special relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity are confirmed by numerous experiments.
Edit: Note this is also a TEDx talk, not regular TED.
To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd
Try to not take life so seriously. The speaker is being philosophical, which will not change the physics we have already documented but could help us think outside the proverbial box.
There is no information in this talk.
Go outside, get some sun, smell some flowers. Not all life is hard math. Most of science isn't even hard math. By the time science involves hard math, we usually have an intuitive sense of what the answer will be and just have to verify it. It takes an immense amount of aimless philosophical wandering to arrive at a question which has a mathematical answer.
I'm with everyone here that this talk had little actual information, but I did take away one neat observation.
Back when he was an astronaut, when his shuttle landed and he stood up in gravity for the first time, he felt like he was on an elevator going up at 1g. I think it's neat because his brain had learned during the space flight that any acceleration means motion. Once he was back on Earth, his brain had to re-learn that the constant 1g we feel does not mean motion.
I think that has more implications for how our brain works and interprets stimuli than it does physics, but it's still neat.
Sorry, what? Is this guy a crackpot or have I missed some kind of joke?
"The speed of light is created by our minds?" Then why do machines perceive it? Why do we notice no changes in it between minds? Why does all of our simple Physics work (e.g. refraction) assuming a fixed speed?
Just because you want it to be true doesn't make it true.
OK, I didn't watch the entire thing, but I skipped around for long enough to satisfy myself that he was setting off a lot of the old crackpot detectors.
1. There's a bit where he puts a quote from Descartes next to a quote from himself.
2. "You might think you are cosmic. But I hope to convince you you are not cosmic, you are Earthlike. And it's all because of a hypothesis I had..."
3. And the inevitable "conclusions" slide where it turns out that his hypothesis solves (in some way which can't be explained in a twelve-minute talk) all the major problems of physics today (dark matter, grand unification etc)
So, Dr Ockels, I'm sticking you in the "provisional crackpot" bin, but if you'd like to explain your theories more carefully, on paper, and with a bunch more equations, I'll have a look at 'em.
Just because we built a machine to measure something doesn't mean it produces what we expect. Arguably, most of science is simply trying to account for the unexpected.
It's questionable whether any being can know what another being perceives (or even if the other being perceives at all). Whether machines "perceive" and what it is they "perceive" (if they do "perceive" at all) is even more questionable.
Some have even questioned whether even the individual self perceives, and the very existence of a self and of minds, etc.
You don't have to be a crackpot to entertain such ideas. You just have to be interested in philosophy (or religion, as the Hindus came up with the idea that the entire world is illusory... many thousands of years ago).
> You don't have to be a crackpot to entertain such ideas. You just have to be interested in philosophy (or religion, as the Hindus came up with the idea that the entire world is illusory... many thousands of years ago).
I agree, but you can't claim to be doing physics at the same time.
It's truly a sad day for philosophy when an old man who has lived an extraordinary life is rejected outright by the crowd who won't even bother to examine his words because the form of "truth" they can recognize must resemble a fantasy narrative they learned to believe in through 17 years of the modern classroom education format.
Just because a thing cannot be expressed succinctly as a tautological formula(F=ma, etc) on a chalk board does not mean it's bunk, non-science and therefore worth completely ignoring.
The guy was a friggin astronaut and is a professor of physics! How many people have been to space? Do you think you'll ever go to space in your life? Probably not.
It's wise to listen up when one of just a few hundred human beings who have been to space says "hey, I've spent my life thinking about this based on my direct experience of having gone into space, and I want to share it with you because maybe you'll find it useful, and it might not even be perfectly true."
He started by berating the audience for pretending to understand the universe and mysteriously declaring, “I know what it is that you don’t know yet and it will change your life”.
Wow. Spoken like a true theoretical scientist. Of course they're right; time will show they're all right. Except those others who only thought they were right: they're morons.
If the mind were not there --- thoughts and memories -- we would not remember a previous moment, we would be in the now. So there would be no time perceived by us.
We would of course then not invent instruments that keep track of time. Is it possible that our clocks don't keep track of time, but of our notion of time. Just wondering??
The only way I can see that working requires two things:
1. We create (physical) reality to some extent at least. By thinking time exists, we are able to create something which can track the progression of something which only exists in our thoughts.
2. Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time. The sun rises, then sets, it doesn't re-wind part way through the day, or simply appear in the middle of the sky.
2b. Unless, of course, this is all a / your dream.
Not to say that this is impossible (just try to disprove it), just convoluted and counter to most of what we (seem to) know.
> Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time
No, but perhaps we are taught the same idea from childhood.
Actually believe there is a tribe where the notion of time does not exist, and their language reflects that. Some linguistic expert found that all his language theories failed w.r.t their language.
Just as an aside, for a ray of light, there is no time. Its always now.
The Piraha? There have been a few articles about them, but most of them have been rather contradictory. For instance, another oddity of their language which is frequently cited is that they don't have any subordinate clauses[1]. And all the articles then go on to show something like the following: a grammar construct which shows the equivalent function, if not the same structure:
Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."
Dissimilar structure may be weird, but it doesn't show they have no way of expressing the same meaning. Similarly with time, from the same article (mirrored many other places), it's not "no notion of time", there's just very little:
They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist.
"Hardly use any" and "have none" are different. Similarly, saying "no notion of time" is the same as not conjugating your verb is ludicrous. I can see no rational requirement for modifying your verbs to show past-tense in order to be understood. Do you understand this? "I run yesterday."
They may be exceptionally abnormal, but the abnormalities have been hyped in the extreme.
edit: cultural influence on language is extremely powerful, not denying that. This is specifically about the oft-mentioned tribe, which has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine; any ill-will towards you detected is unintended, just cross-fire. As I think the tribe does not fit the no-time requirement, we're back to all humans apparently comprehending time in the same way.
err umm ... actually I was speaking about a race on Arcturus, that is composed of light. "Light Beings" they call themselves. Never at rest. No concept of speed of light. (j/k).
I liked this. He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds, that we are incapable of conscious experience outside of the context of time, and therefore everything we can possibly cognize is bounded by a set of a priori constraints which we can recognize.
iirc, Eckhart Tolle breaks time into clock time and psychological time. Perhaps, he does this to make it easy for audiences. But basically he does not debunk time. Psychological time is a mind created state which allows for the existence of a personal story.
When one stays in the present moment, one breaks out of psy time, but clock time still exists. I hope i have not misquoted him.
I'm a philo nut. I've read Hume's Treatise, as it of course is well documented in Kant's into to Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant started his whole journey into creating his system of Transcendental Philosophy because of Hume's deep questioning of the reality of causality.
Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion, but it was only a century after Kant's era that the holy texts of those religions were translated for Europeans. Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to have read the Upanishads and other Eastern religious texts, and then to also work Eastern ideas into the historical backdrop of Western philosophy.
Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion
Bear in mind that in the ancient world, there wasn't necessarily a sharp distinction between "philosophy" and "religion". There is evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans considered the "Brahmanas" (Hindus) and "śramanas" (Buddhists) to be simply different schools of philosophers.
From wikipedia:
In the 2nd century CE, the Christian dogmatist, Clement of Alexandria recognized Bactrian Buddhists (śramanas) and Indian gymnosophists for their influence on Greek thought:
"Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the śramanas among the Bactrians ("Σαρμαναίοι Βάκτρων"); and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour's birth, and came into the land of Judea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called śramanas ("Σαρμάναι"), and others Brahmins ("Βραφμαναι")." Clement of Alexandria "The Stromata, or Miscellanies" Book I, Chapter XV
It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd. Physics is in fact independent of the actual value of the speed of light.
The idea that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in all reference frames is a postulate of special relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity are confirmed by numerous experiments.
Edit: Note this is also a TEDx talk, not regular TED.