Philosophy Now Forum

Do you realize what saying that dimensions are merely mathematical constructs and have no bearing on reality implies?
That means that when I say, my house is 5 miles from work" I am not saying anything about reality!

To say that dimensions do not exist =saying that height, depthand width do not exist!

Obvious Leo wrote:

raw_thought wrote:But is it likely that the universe fine tunes constants ( like plank's constant and the speed of light) in order to create life?

The speed of light is NOT a constant and this is very easily proven. The speed of light is merely OBSERVED TO BE A CONSTANT in the referential frame of the observer.

I will send links that prove that the speed of light is the same for all velocities.
However, I recall a Steven Wright joke.
He was at a job interview. After he answered all the questions, the job interviewer asked, "do you have any questions"?
Steve answered," if I am travelling at the speed of light and I turn on a flashlight forwards, does anything happen?
The job interviewer said," I dont know."
Steve replied, "I dont want the job!"
I will have to ponder that!

raw_thought wrote:To say that dimensions do not exist =saying that height, depthand width do not exist!

Correct. These are merely constructs of the human consciousness and have no ontological status. This is actually what relativity means because such measurements are entirely observer-dependent. The observer problem in physics is often even called the measurement problem, or even the consciousness problem which is more precisely what it is. We don't observe the world at all like we imagine that we do. All we do is make a cognitive MAP of it, complete with all our preconceptions of what we're actually looking at. We see what we want to see, or more precisely we see what we expect to see, which is what wave/particle duality is all about.

"It is the THEORY which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein.

Don't be fooled at all the confected elation shown by the geeks when they discovered the Higgs boson at the LHC. That was just jollies for pollies to keep the cash flowing in but deep down they were shattered and many of them openly said so. These guys know confirmation bias when they see it.

The speed of light is the same on the moon as it is on the earth as it is in a black hole as it is anywhere in the universe. AS MEASURED LOCALLY.

Therefore the speed of light is NOT a constant because the clocks on which this is being measured run at different speeds depending on gravity. QED.

I take it you get my point. We agree that the speed of light is 300 million metres/sec in the black hole just as it is 300 million metres/sec on earth. However our seconds are vastly different time intervals.

I am saying that the speed of light is 186,282 mps for all observers.

Speed is a ratio. Distance unit per time unit. D/T will always be the same for light. That ratio is a constant.

The clocks run at different rates because of different velocities.

raw_thought wrote:I am saying that the speed of light is 186,282 mps for all observers.

And I'm agreeing with you. Therefore the speed of light is not a constant because gravity is variable all the way down to the Planck scale. The latest gee-whiz caesium clock shows that a clock on the carpet ticks faster than a clock on the bare floorboards beside it, 1cm lower. The speed of light will be the same for these two observers but only because they're measuring it on clocks running at different speeds. What this shows is that the speed of light and the speed at which time passes are one and the same thing and this is a very significant unification for any new physics. Bear in mind that this caesium clock is a sundial compared with the Planck scale. A clock on the electron runs faster than one on the nucleus it orbits and THIS IS QUANTUM GRAVITY. This is GR incorporated into the SM.

raw_thought wrote:The clocks run at different rates because of different velocities.

Different velocities of what?

v=d/t. If t is not a constant then how can v be?

Don't forget that the constant speed of light was an assumption built into physics before GR and thus before it was understood that time did not pass at a constant speed. The problem of quantum gravity lies in the fact that this oversight was never corrected for, which is why I call it the elephant in the room of physics.

Obvious Leo wrote:

raw_thought wrote:The clocks run at different rates because of different velocities.

Different velocities of what?

If a person travels at 50 mph and another person travels at 1/2 the speed of light, their clocks will be different.

Since you say that space is an illusion and only time exists, that implies that distance (a dimension ) is an illusion. Do you believe that all locations are one location? That only one thing exists? That I am everything?