Friday, June 21, 2024

Forward On The Count Of TWO

 Yes, as it behooves us to do, as though we were beasts with hooves. But seriously, folks, fiends and nebbishes, one and all, I had a great evening last evening and a fine morning this morning, with mild temps, brisk winds, and the promise of more rain in the air. The forecast has changed, it seems, with a fresh charge of moisture from Alberto. The "clock" problem in physics seems to be underestimated, as all time-keeping devices are extended objects. The typical assumption is that of a temporal continuum but in fact, there is no way to confirm that. It's a matter of, on very tiny scales, backward light cones comprising the various bits and pieces of any putative "clock", with which we would define a "present". Weyl assumes a temporal continuum. In practice, that seems problematic, at the very least. One motivation for string theory was the problem of dealing with points, the points comprising the wiggly lines in Feynman diagrams, for instance. 







I think Susskind has dealt with this problem in terms of clocks as physical objects embedded in de Sitter space.


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