nix wrote:Given that objects with mass exist, If everything in space were permenantly frozen in place there would be no such thing as physically real time.
Just as the distribution of objects defines physical space, so the change in this distribution defines physical time. So the ontological status of physical time cannot be different from the ontological status of physical space.
I'm referring to something far simpler. Set aside your conceptual bias for a moment and assume that time is exactly what it appears to be and that it indeed PASSES. Since this has been the view of every major philosopher in history it's not such a crackpot idea, nix. If the passage of time is an ontologically real phenomenon, contrary to the spacetime model, then the speed at which it passes must likewise be regarded as real. However the speed at which time passes is inversely proportional to the strength of the gravitational "field",in a defined and precise mathematical relationship. When we specify one we automatically specify the other in whatever units of measurement we choose to adopt. This means that gravity and time are simply two different ways of expressing the same thing and can therefore be quantised equivalently in an interval such as the Planck interval. THIS IS QUANTUM GRAVITY. This relationship between gravity and time can be modelled in a 2D Euclidean plane as an absurdly steep hyperbola, the "flat" section of which represents a region which is describable by SR to a very high order of approximation.
However the apparently "flat" section of a hyperbolic curve is not in fact a straight line but a very flat curve and this gets rid of the nonsensical "flat space" assumed in the Standard Model. Electrons do indeed orbit their nuclei in exactly the same way as planets orbit their stars and this immediately gets rid of all the quantum weirdness. The gravitational motion of all bodies in an n-body system is CHAOTIC and the precise trajectory of none of them can ever be precisely determined, even in principle. On a cosmological scale these chaotic perturbations are negligible but not irrelevant. However on the sub-atomic scale they are of enormous consequence simply because of the enormous relativistic speeds of the particles concerned. Any meaningful predictions can only be derived probabilistically, such as with wave functions.
This is where the laws of physics come from, nix, which are actually no such thing. Physics manages to get cause and effect arse-about by assuming that reality is made according to a suite of physical laws and this is the observer problem which gave rise to god and physics equally. Humans are pattern-recognisers and assume that the orderly patterns we observe in nature must be the consequence of a law-derived reality but this assumption is false. Electro-magnetism is not a
cause of the electrons orbit but an emergent
effect of the electrons orbit. The same goes for all the other various forces and fields we choose to invent to model our observations. In fact the same goes for the particles themselves which can only be sensibly modelled as point-like entities in the Cartesian space. The laws of physics are simply the laws of physicists because gravity and time alone are needed to account for our observations at the sub-atomic scale and both gravity and time are absent from the Standard Model. Every physicist worthy of the name knows perfectly well that this is what's wrong with this model but the problem lies with the a priori narrative they proceed from and their understanding of determinism. The motion of all physical entities in the universe is determined non-linearly and not linearly as Newton assumed. Can't you see that if nature was linearly determined then the entire future of the universe would be predictable, a proposition which flies in the face of the facts?
Sub-atomic particles move in exactly the same way as the gas molecules in Brownian motion. Even today you might read in a physics text that such motion is random but this is utter bullshit. This motion is CHAOTIC and chaotic motion is both completely deterministic and utterly unpredictable. There is no such thing as random motion in a causal reality and conflating non-predictability with randomness is the biggest conceptual blunder in physics because it puts the cart before the horse. In non-linear dynamic systems matter and energy are SELF-ORGANISING according to only the single meta-law of cause and effect and it is this process of self-organisation which physics is mistakenly modelling as law-derived.
I'm not pulling your chain, nix, because I've been working on this problem for decades. This is the real deal and I can fucking well prove it.
nix wrote:
No it does not and explicitly so! GR describes gravity as an effect which propagates through space at a finite rate (the speed of light). That is what gravity waves are all about, which are predicted by GR. For an action at a distance theory the interaction is instantaneous.
This answers nothing. It doesn't answer HOW these so-called gravitational waves are propagated and without such a mechanism spooky action at a distance won't simply go away. In a spaceless model the speed of light and the speed at which time passes are one and the same thing and thus such a model offers a simple and obvious mechanism for gravity. Such phenomena as gravitational lensing and the "expanding space" become self-explanatory because gravity is not seen as a force but as a fundamental property of the universe from which all the other so-called forces derive.
nix wrote:Given that objects with mass exist, If everything in space were permenantly frozen in place there would be no such thing as physically real time.
Exactly. Once you assume the physical existence of the Cartesian space then physically real time is impossible. Ontologically it is clear that time and space are mutually exclusive constructs, a fact which gave rise to Minkowski's frozen "block". Time and space cannot both be physically real and I'm claiming that Einstein nailed his colours to the wrong mast because he misinterpreted the findings of Michelson-Morley. (In fact Einstein was barely aware of this experiment at the time when he published SR but that's a whole different story.)
nix wrote: So the ontological status of physical time cannot be different from the ontological status of physical space.
This is logically nonsensical and not even a physicist would buy it if you could find one who knew what ontology meant. Relativity means that only one can be physically real thus defining the other as only relatively or contingently real.