4 ms·

Speaking as a physicist, I in general like this article, however there is a nasty technical point to make, which is that if you actually use distance units to m

by drostie 11y ago

Speaking as a physicist, I in general like this article, however there is a nasty technical point to make, which is that if you actually use distance units to measure time, we look like the "inanimate object, simple pattern", not the "living object, complex pattern." Moreover the "death, disintegration" slide is not going to be what you look like unless you happened to be in the vicinity of a bomb at your death. Still the question of how we reconcile our sense of ourselves as speech-act-performing free-will-having conscious-feeling observers embedded in a changing world, with a relativistic perspective which says "there probably isn't one constantly-updating 'present' because a 'present' can be any hyperplane between two light cones, and therefore we can never have any physical basis to choose one as the correct one," is one of many really important philosophical questions that I think are important, though not really my domain.

tmsam 11y ago
As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?
- drostie 11y ago
  Because the timescales that you're "moving" on are very long from a relativistic perspective. If we localize you in spacetime you're maybe a meter long in one direction, two meters in another, half a meter in a third, and... 30,000 km in the fourth. If we look at you on the nanosecond timescale that you need to see time as "meters" we find that except for, say, electrons' worldlines about the nuclei, your worldlines are very much all parallel to each other.

by drostie 11y ago

tmsam 11y ago

As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?

drostie 11y ago
Because the timescales that you're "moving" on are very long from a relativistic perspective. If we localize you in spacetime you're maybe a meter long in one direction, two meters in another, half a meter in a third, and... 30,000 km in the fourth. If we look at you on the nanosecond timescale that you need to see time as "meters" we find that except for, say, electrons' worldlines about the nuclei, your worldlines are very much all parallel to each other.