The general mile-a-minute solve-all-of-physics style of presentation here is tripping my crackpot sensors like crazy. You might want to pick one of your physics topics and start with just that.
Also, wondering how much you actually know about this stuff. I’m not a physicist, but ended up looking up bits about relativistic spacetime when trying to figure out what on earth Greg Egan is going on about these days. Now this bit,
Time is not a special spacial dimension. It’s not an illusion, either. Time is just a plain old spacial dimension, no different from any other.
seems to be just wrong. A big deal with Minkowski spacetime is that the time dimension has a mathematically different behavior from the three space dimensions, even when you treat the whole thing as a timeless 4-dimensional blob. You can’t plug in a fourth “spatial dimension, no different from any other”, and get the physics we have.
Minkowski spacetime is primarily concerned with causal distance; whether event A can be causally related to event B. Time has a negative sign when you’re considering causality, because your primary goal is to see whether any effect from event A could have been involved in event B. Using the Minkowski definition of time, an object A ten million light years away from object B has a negligible spacetime distance from that object ten million years in the future and ten million years in the past from any given point in time.
The general mile-a-minute solve-all-of-physics style of presentation here is tripping my crackpot sensors like crazy. You might want to pick one of your physics topics and start with just that.
Also, wondering how much you actually know about this stuff. I’m not a physicist, but ended up looking up bits about relativistic spacetime when trying to figure out what on earth Greg Egan is going on about these days. Now this bit,
seems to be just wrong. A big deal with Minkowski spacetime is that the time dimension has a mathematically different behavior from the three space dimensions, even when you treat the whole thing as a timeless 4-dimensional blob. You can’t plug in a fourth “spatial dimension, no different from any other”, and get the physics we have.
Minkowski spacetime is primarily concerned with causal distance; whether event A can be causally related to event B. Time has a negative sign when you’re considering causality, because your primary goal is to see whether any effect from event A could have been involved in event B. Using the Minkowski definition of time, an object A ten million light years away from object B has a negligible spacetime distance from that object ten million years in the future and ten million years in the past from any given point in time.