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Underground > Laboratory >

What is the Shape of Time?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

20:47 / 05.02.06

Linky. I got lost about a third of the way through the first powerpoint presentation, but I'm guessing this would contradict most of the work of cosmology by the likes of Einstein and Hawking? Is the 'standard model' if there is such a thing, primarily three dimensions of space and one of time, then all sorts of exciting wrapped up spacial dimensions? Am I right? And what would Mayer's theory do to that?

22:12 / 05.02.06

"Contradict" is far too strong a term to use. Rather, it is already known that both General Relativity and Quantum mechanics aren't...the whole story. In the same way that Newtonian mechanics was superseded, but also absorbed (I mean, it is still used today because it has a large domain of validity), people are working toward a theory of everything that will take over.

I'm not sure if Mayer is being that ambitious...I think he is restricting himself to revising GR (which is a 3+1 dimensional model, btw) by adding extra time dimensions which would correctly model certain things that GR doesn't model well ("well" is a tricky term here. GPS is accurate to about 1 metre or so, which is astonishingly accurate...Mayer is proposing to correct for certain anomalies in GPS, and certain effects to do with the bending of light. This is clearly worthwhile, but one needs to also put it in perspective.)

22:50 / 05.02.06

My spidey sense is tingling.

He clearly knows the subject, but somehow his tone is...not what one would expect. Lots of big statements which, despite all the facts that he presents, are actually quite sparse in detail. His big idea, that the time dimension of space is not "flat" is ok, but there is surprisingly little math behind it. He repeatedly just states conclusions. You'd expect a serious attempt at this - especially when the author keeps referring to Einstein's mistakes - to have a mathematical model that approximates to GR. I'm not sure he does. I'm not an expert at all, so I may be wrong here, but I've been to enough seminars and I can tell when someone is playing a bit fast and loose.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I decided to look him up at Stanford physics. And I noticed that he isn't part of the faculty, but an *affiliate*. Hmmm. Those guys tend to be oddballs, in my experience. So then I looked in the arXiv, and he doesn't have any papers there, as far as I can tell. Thats very, very strange for someone who is going to revolutionise physics.

10:38 / 06.02.06

It`s a steady state cosmology. He doesn`t think the universe is expanding.

Normally the red shift from far away galaxies (think doppler effect) is taken as evidence that they are moving away from us. Mayer is taking this to mean that space-time is a lot more curved than we originally thought. This neatly does away with problems with expansion theory (dark matter and energy).

He gets around the clumping problem ( if the universe is a steady state why doesn`t all the matter bunch up) using white holes at the other end of black holes (and provides hubble slides of what he thinks are white holes).

He also explains the problems with the cosmic background radiation and why spacecraft leaving the solar system accelarate by more than the predicted amount.

Hmmmm. There should be a big flaw in this somewhere but I can`t find it. More after research.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:50 / 06.02.06

Maybe he's saving the detail up for the book he says he's writing?

OK, now to try and keep the 'In Our Time' vibe going here, how do physicists deal with time? Do they treat it as just another dimension that we can't point in, or do they treat it completely differently to height, width, depth?

11:05 / 06.02.06

They think in terms of space-time. Space and time are linked but different. Explained in this thread.