Welcome to Gaia! ::

After some thought, I came to the far fetched idea that Time plays It's self out in a way siilar to a movie.

______________________________
To start, allow me to make up some terms to make explaining this easier.

Frames: The smallest fraction of time possible. Each frame contains all the matter in the universe in a frozen state. It is one moment of the universe's exsistance.
______________________________

Okay, the theory:

Have you ever considered that all matter that ever was and ever will be is in one large pile? Everything mapped out, but cluttered together in the temporary existance of this universe? So, If this is true, how would everything function? Time. Time is a divider between entire sets of matter, that each is nearly identical to the next and previous dimention that is separated by time. I call these dimentions frames. It is only by the perspective of a living thing that can put these in order to exsist in a small insignifigant part of this space-time lump.

This whole thing is still in the works.
It explains some stuff
But confuses more.

Let's say at some point, magically, east and west were interchanged throughout the universe, perfectly reflected--object positions, velocities, fields, everything. If space is absolute, in that things have an absolute positions, velocities, etc. independent of any other object, this magical operation would make the universe different. But would such an event be detectable even in principle? Of course not. This event would preserve every relationship between objects, so no measurement could ever detect it. From this, one gets a very important physical fact: it makes no physical sense to talk about absolute space because such a thing cannot be observed even in principle.

And that's the real problem with your scenario. Not that it conflicts with relativity per se, but that it conflicts with even the principle of of relativity--that physics is about relationships, not absolutes. Your proposal effectively re-introduces the concept of absolute space ('screen'), on which the objects ('actors') are 'projected', but this absolute space is never observed or even can be observed by anyone anywhere, and hence lacks physical meaning. At best, it's a statement of metaphysics rather than physics.

Since two observers moving relative to each other would produce different sets of frames we would have to alter the idea of frame to make it something that is dependent on the motion of the observer as well as the state of the universe. Making this adjustment then we produce a set of sets of different frames one for each possible perspective. We could adapt the rules of special relativity to operate in a set theoretic manner on these frames so as to transform one set from one perspective into annother. Once we had worked out this set theoretic version of things (assuming that the set theory does in fact exist since I have no reason to think that it doesn't) then we have a universe of sets that acts in a way that is analogous to spacetime. As noted previously though since relativity operates on a continuous space our frames would also have to preserve this continuity. We can preserve the idea of continuity if for the set of frames corresponding to every perspective we make each frame be associated with a number on the real number line in a one to one fashion. This creates continuity in the sense that every real interval has an associated set of frames that is non-empty. The interesting thing about this sort of setup though is that there needn't be any sort of relation between frames in terms of the sequence in which they are played on the projector so to speak. So you could go immediately from the frame located at 1.2 to the frame located at 3.4 and then back to 2.7 and no one in the universe would be any the wiser. Since the everyone in the universe would only exist in the state that is represented by the frames that sort of random resuffling of the time coordinate would have no measurable effect. Interestingly though we cannot resuffle the instants in the universe in any arbitrary way since every instant must be in the chain or else the universe described by the chain would be measurably different in some way from the real one. Just because the idea seems intriguing to me I couldn't help but apply the idea of countable and uncountable infinities to this problem. Since I assumed a one to one correspondence between the frames of a perspective and numbers on the real number line it follows that in any perspective the set of all frames should have a cardinality equal to that of R. But this poses an interesting question. Since there are uncountably many frames then it becomes impossible to make an ordered list of them all. Any list we make will be missing some. (to see this consider the numbers between zero and one. If we make any arbitrary list of these numbers then no matter what list we make we can construct a number that is not on the list. We do it by taking the first digit of the first number and the second digit of the second number and so on and so forth and then we add one to the digit if it is 0-8 and make the digt 0 if it is 9. The new constructed number differs from the first number on our list by its first digit the second number by its second digit and so on. So our constructed number is different from all the numbers on the list.) So this is for me essentially the best argument for and against thinking about moments as "frames" because it inherently means that anyone putting together a film of the universe wouldn't be able to order all of the slides. However at the same time I find it intriguing to think of this argument as an argument for the idea that time must in fact be discrete precisely so that it has the property that we can put its moments into an ordered list.

Note I didn't want to reduce the entire state of the universe to the real number line but simply number these states in a manner that is analogous to taking a slice through the universe. One for each moment of time. The dimensionality of these slices is unimportant to the argument regardless of their dimension they become the elements in the sets and since we are taking a slice one dimension less than the dimension of the complete object a single extra dimension is enough to map the entirety of the "frames" onto even in a linear manner.

There needn't be any particular "next" frame in order to preserve continuity after all it is the whole point of the real number line that there is no "next" number but it is the very essence of what it is to be continuous. All that is necessary for something to be continuous is that all of its limits exist. Since the limits of intervals along the real number line limit continuously down to a set which contains a single element for a single number then the idea of continuity is always maintained so long as there exists a one to one relation between the elements in the set and the real numbers. The exact method of assignment between the real numbers and the 6dimensional slices though needn't follow an ordering relation. That is to say the concept of continuity is preserved in my scheme only when looking at the real number line and its associated sets but there is no concept of continuity between the slices themselves because their only ordering relation is with the real number line with which I have let them be associated.

Being able to list the moments of the universe does have a certain aesthetic quality to me but I agree that it is almost certainly not possible in any absolute way. Even this numbering scheme would work only from the perspective of a particular frame of reference which would be essentially useless. However that is not the point of the argument. The idea is that by noting that time seems to exist in such a way that it can be played out with each frame being followed by the next implies the existence of a smallest unit of time. That this might indeed work out in some sense in QM makes the argument even more exciting to me since it predicts it in such a roundabout manner by way of cantor set theory no less!

sorry for any ambiguity that is what I meant.


I started a definition of a very general kind of continuity that I was going to propose but I didn't find it satisfactory so I might try to present it at some future point but I have two finals to take this week so I am not going to finish it now. Instead I am just going to settle for saying something about the neighborhood of the frames. Let the N-neighborhood of a frame F be the set of frames whose associated real number labels are within N of the number associated with F. All I mean by the preservation of continuity is that if we consider any frame F and consider its N-neighborhood then the set of every N neighborhood is a subset of the M neighborhood of that frame iff M>N.



Whether or not time was continuous or discrete is a topic I have discussed with a friend of mine since junior high. While there were some interesting concepts involving self similarity something similar to the argument I presented here was the best argument I remember for the discrete nature of time. What argument might you present for the discrete nature of time which would be more convincing/simpler?

that every mapping would be equally valid regardless was actually kind of the point and the idea that every frame was preserved was just so that all of the information in the original spacetime representation of the universe was preserved.

I'm saying a little bit more than that since I am also giving the points a topological property of being connected whereas the objects in the set needn't be but yeah its pretty trivial.

I would make some semblance of a proper reply VorpalNeko but instead I am just going to ask. even assuming the mapping is totally arbitrary isn't there enough information left in the set of frames to transform one to annother? I think there is since if the frames were to be "played" then anyone inside the frames wouldn't notice the random rearrangement of time since their internal states haven't been changed in anyway. So in otherwords even a random remapping of the time coordinate should really just correspond to a kind of change of coordinate systems shouldn't it?

No, there is not, and that's the problem. You've destroyed the original information by redefining the topology through this arbitrary mapping. It's like taking a sampling of a signal and jumbling it up arbitrarily. Now, it's nigh-impossible to tell whether or not what you got was Mozart or Bach or pseudo-random noise.


No. The original space had a certain topological structure defined on it, and now it is gone, since you've explicitly redefined the notion of neighborhood to be according to the arbitrary mapping. A proper change of coordinates would involve no change in topology.