Re: Is "Spacetime" a misnomer?

Barry wrote:
surrealistic-dream@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:


Now I clearly grasp what I merely assumed intuitively. You want a 3d
space trace of a particle parameterized by some time parameter.

Absolutely wrong. I don't know how you could have got that from what
I've been writing. You've found a particular sentence and misinterpreted
in a way that is either dishonest or careless.

I will be kind and assume that it was carelessness.

I have never made any reference to a 3D space in this thread.

Then I apologize for the mistake on my part.


You should be thinking about what you read, not "merely assuming".



I told
you that this is a misconception of the role of spacetime. You think in
terms of your 'box', which is to you some all-important frame of
reference.


It's you that is thinking in your box. I know, because I used to be in
there with you. And your careless reading gives you away.

I found my own way out, perhaps you'll be able to do the same.

I obviously can't help you.


You don't get the importance of the Lorentz transformation on space and
time components, on E and B components, or on momentum and energy
components.


Your presumption that I am ignorant is doing you no good. That's a box
that you've put yourself in. That's the first box you have to climb out of.

I made no such assumption or claim about you. And I gave you the respect
of reading what you wrote most carefully.


You can't uniquely "distribute time" throughout any coordinate system in
any case.

I know that. I couldn't care less about uniqueness!

All you can do is decide which clocks you want to use.

Indeed, if "coordinate time" really were "time", would we need to
"distribute" it, wouldn't it be there already?


Physics is not metaphysics. There is no such thing as "real time" or
"time already being there." When one sets up an operational procedure
for coordinating time over a reference frame, all one can hope to
achieve is self-consistency. The simultaneity of event pairs is a
reference frame dependent notion. Simultaneity of spacially separated
events is a human invention. Physical concepts are free creations of
the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined
by the external world.

If I understand your set up of a 4d space, which uses one clock at one
point (say at x = 0), that does you what good for testing a dynamical
theory of particle motion or clock behavior? In other words, how does
one ever know what time it is at space point x = 5, say? It doesn't
even seem to have any meaning in your set up.

At the end of the day, coordinate time makes intuitive sense in any
given reference frame, justified by our common experience of the
external world. Where commonsense went wrong was the assumption that
simultaneity is absolute.

.

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