Re: Is temporal sign ambiguity inherent in Einstein's general relativistic field equation?
- From: "John Bell" <john.bell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 22:08:40 +0000 (UTC)
Oh No wrote:
Thus spake tttito <vecchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>This comment appears to be based on a misunderstanding. I have no
John Bell ha scritto:
tttito wrote:
I am unable
to understand some of Charles' claims,
Ditto.
Unfortunate. You could try grilling me on gr-qc/0604047 or gr-
qc/0508077. I would be most appreciative if it helped me to find ways of
expressing myself that were easier to understand.
difficulty understanding your linguistic expression of your beliefs, I
just don't understand beliefs that are inconsistent with experiential
knowledge and rigorous logical deduction. In this context I also intend
responding to your earlier posting in due course, unless the moderator
has closed that possibility in the meantime.
Your comment also contains the implied assumption that we have
something to gain by adopting your beliefs, as opposed to vice versa.
That assumption can be objectively tested by asking the following
questions:
1) Does your understanding contain anything new (i.e. unpublished)?
2) If so, do those new components allow you to make original
predictions?
3) If so, have a plurality of those predictions subsequently been
independently verified by experiment and/or astronomical observation?
Unless you can answer yes to all of the above, I can conclude with
certainty that the boot is really on the other foot.
but we seem to agree on this.
That's probably the reason why we both consider RQM so important,
although our understandings thereof differ.
I am not familiar with the acronym RQM. Please clarify.
RQM stands for Relational Quantum Mechanics, a buzzword that was coined
by Rovelli ([1]) to encode the potentially fertile idea that
"different observers may give different accounts of the same set of
events".
This is a simple enough idea. An observer's account of a set of events
is clearly dependent on the information available to that observer.
This is obvious when all observers can agree that they are viewing the
same set of events from different perspectives. Problems only arise
when they can't.
Relational Quantum Mechanics holds that this simple fact is built intoIn that case I reserve judgement, since the philosophy can equally well
the mathematical quantum formalism of quantum theory at a fundamental
level.
be applied to excuse sloppy logic, in situations where all observers
can't agree.
The obvious question "How do you know that the events are the same if
the accounts are different?" may be with us for some time.
In a sense that is not a question in RQM. I assume that there is a
physical universe which is as it is.
That appears to be a classical principle which became untenable when it
was realised that the classical 'impartial observer' had to be replaced
with the modern 'active participant'
What an observer can say about it
depends on his observations, however.
Nope, It depends on the combined effect of his observations and actions
(which amount to the same thing at the QM level). This I can confirm in
everyday life, as well as in QM labs.
While Rovelli has the merit of pinpointing the issue, a related idea
surfaced at around the same time in Hawking's QG work (see [2] and cf.
[3] for an instructive example example by John Baez). One might claim
that RQM harks back to Kierkegaard's notion of subjective truth, that
reportedly influenced Bohr. Among s.p.r. posters, Charles Francis and
Thomas Larsson have found RQM inspiring for their QG work.
My own version of RQM is actually based on a principle first clearly
stated by Descartes, that we cannot say where something is unless we say
where it is relative to other matter,
Of course. This statement closely follows the philosophy expounded by
Einstein in the fifth appendix of his popular exposition (1954).
together with a recognition thatYou are doing it again. This latter assertion is extremely tenuous when
measurement of position is somehow more fundamental than other
measurement, since all measurements can be reduced to a measurement of
position (e.g. the position of a pointer).
applied to concepts such as colour, taste, temperature, and
intelligence. You are therefore in danger of losing more than you gain
by reducing reality universally to such a banal level.
John Bell
http://global.accelerators.co.uk
.
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