The Change Stream

As you may already have noted, I am not the only one having ideas about time. Have you come across "The end of Time" by Julian Barbour? Simon Morley on the other hand with the idea of Change Events has a more realistic view I think. Here I try to elaborate on that.

Posted April 2013.

In thisistime, Simon Morley suggests that "Time" is only an abstract because it does not actually exist. Change Events, on the other hand are real. His arguments are different from mine but our conclusions agree. Time is not as fundamental as it is supposed to be. What is truly fundamental is change.

These days most scientists agree that our universe does have a kind of substance at some level. This is very often referred to as "the fabric of space". What I claim to have worked out is how this "fabric of space" may also be the single cause of all physical phenomena due to a probable property of elasticity which made space itself oscillate when "the big bang" went off.

Please understand that I do not claim to know what caused the big bang. Only some of what came out as a result of that event.
The "ignition" of the big bang is, as far as I understand, the only event in physics which, along with the ultimate origin of the fabric of the universe, may be open for religious speculation. Most of the rest was possible to account for in the four original tiddlers. Here I will only try to concentrate on showing what the cause of change and of the individual change streams may be.

Even so, a few other fundamental details also need to be explained. A more complete account may be found in the other essays.

There is no way at the moment to know for certain in what state the fabric of the universe was before the big bang happened or if it it even existed before that. After the event we know a bit more but still need to guess what properties the elusive fabric of the universe might have. My guess is that it is elastic and I will shortly explain why I think so.

One might also pick an effect to see what eventual property might cause it. In my case I had the idea that time might be discrete, so I set out to try and find a mechanism by which the property of elasticity might give cause for discrete time.

Why would I think that the fabric of the universe is elastic?
That is because most of the arguments that were used to undermine the old aether ideas are still valid today and will need to be addressed before the idea of an aether-like fabric of space and universe may be considered again.

Elasticity takes care of the first and foremost objection to any and all aether models by explaining how planets and objects can move in space without slowing down.
Also, the polarization of light indicates that it is a transverse wave in an elastic solid.
That would presumably be our fabric of space.

Speaking of light, does time pass in a light-wave? No? Is it because time stand still when the light-wave move at the speed of light or could it be because time does not exist?

How then can planets and other objects of matter pass through an elastic solid without being slowed to a standstill?
Because matter is also a wave in the elastic solid, similar to light but different.
Longitudinal instead of transverse, just like a sound-wave.
They do not push their way through anything. They move in the fabric of space as an integrated local oscillation.

The big bang left behind one other effect besides also creating a lot of sound- and light- waves.
The tremendous blow to the elastic solid caused it to oscillate. An oscillation, which probably as a consequence of the way the big bang happened, soon settled down to a pulsating mode where the total volume of space rapidly oscillates in volume between being large and being small around a mean volume, in the process also driving the matter and light oscillations by resonance.
These rapid bulk oscillations are a consequence of the elastic properties of the fabric of space and are the reason the transverse light-waves move at the speed of light.
The elastic interior of the longitudinal matter-waves also move at the speed of light. These pulsating oscillations brings us back to the question of time and change because each such oscillation may be regarded as a moment when change can occur.
To us this is simply the present moment.

The duration of the present moment is presumably identical to Planck time. Very short but not zero, and instantly recurring as it has ever since the big bang. A periodic change of the volume of space.

So the present moment is actually more like a dimension of change in the spirit of Simon Morley. Because what happens?
The total volume of space alters size in a controlled cyclic and synchronized way, driven by the stress/strain energy injected into the elastic solid by the big bang, and so does also the waves of matter as well as those of light.

To the transverse waves nothing remarkable happens.
They will happily wave on. In their case the resonance with the oscillations of space will stop them from spreading out sideways, keeping them concentrated as well as driving them at the speed of light.
We call them photons.

However that is not the case for the longitudinal matter-waves (that they happily wave on..) because they have a spherical wavefront and their resonance with the oscillations of space itself makes the wavefront of each matter-wave turn around every oscillation and head for its own center, in effect making the wave of matter oscillate in the same pulsating way the fabric of space does.

We already have a name for effects originating with these oscillations of the fabric of space. We call them quantum effects, and the oscillations of the matter-wave is what brings about the property of spin.

Okay, but if the matter-waves turn around like that they will surely never get anywhere?
Not if the internal distribution of stress and strain between different parts of the matter-wave is completely symmetric, that is true, but otherwise when this distribution is non-symmetric after the matter-wave has been accelerated by for instance a collision with another matter-wave, it would move stepwise in the non-symmetric direction each oscillation and continue to do so until another collision sends it elsewhere.
The explanation we have for this behavior is that inertia keeps the matter going.

What happens is that the non-symmetric part of the matter-wave is pushing and pulling the wave in the non-symmetric direction due to their resonance with the oscillations of the fabric of space, at the same time as this resonance keeps the wave "waving".

If the lack of symmetry of the matter-wave is large, it will move fast.
The larger the faster, but the wavefront will still turn around every oscillation and head for its own center.
As a consequence it can never be accelerated to reach the speed of light.

Arriving at the center the wave will bounce. That is the best description I have for what happens. It bounces and turn around to head outwards again, still driven by its resonance with the space-oscillations.
The part of the elastic wavefront that belong to the original matter-wave would more or less have the shape of a a sphere, but it may also store directed elastic energy, similar to a bouncing ball. That is the non-symmetric part of the wave which will make it bounce in the direction this elastic energy is stored.

Thanks to Einstein everyone know by now that the faster an object is moving, the slower time passes on that object.
The reason for this is somewhat subtle but at the same time quite simple. It involve realizing that "time is what clocks measure", first paragraph, and also to understand that the hands of a clock are re-positioned little by little during the course of each recurring present moment, which brings us back to the idea of change.

Change is what happens when the fabric of space oscillates and it is space itself, due to the volume oscillations, that change.
As a result every wave of matter in space also may change during each present moment due to the resonance between space and matter-wave. Every bouncing matter-wave carries its own "change stream" to guide it in the form of the internal distribution of stress and strain in the wave.

When a non-symmetric matter-wave bounce back and forth between its own outer perimeter and focus any new change to its distribution of stress and strain will require more energy to be effected then it would need if the wave was more symmetric. Because the amount of energy available for change during each moment is limited by what we call the "quantum of action", more moments will be required for the same amount of change to take place in the non-symmetric case as would be required when the matter-wave is more symmetric.
Since more moments are needed for the job the eventual observer will think that time has slowed down.

As you can see it is all a matter of change.

The duration of the elastic present moment, one full cycle of the pulsating mode of oscillation of the fabric of the universe, is also change. A cyclic altering of volume from small past a mean size to large and then back past mean size to small again.

This altering of volume is cyclic, so why did I pick the small size as the start of the cycle?
That is because the expanding space allow the change stream of each bouncing wave of matter to expand in whichever direction its internal distribution of stress and strain is pointing which, incidentally, also is where the "arrow of time" is pointing.
In the direction of expansion.

To my mind the idea of change and change stream as proposed by Simon Morley in thisistime allows for a more intuitive picture of the causal connections between the various physical phenomena and their origin.

Thanks Simon!

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