An article in the Guardian this morning refers to experimental evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos
This would be a revolutionary discovery if it's corroborated.
I made the following comment from a materialist dialectical perspective :
Time is just an accident of interacting material forces. So the direction of time just reflects the direction of interaction. Cause and effect is an even more fundamental axiom in our understanding of the world than the constancy of the speed of light. Meaning cause comes first and effect follows it. Without cause and effect not only would we be buggered, there wouldn't be any us to be buggered.
So indeterminacy and the rest of it is an arse-first way of saying we don't clearly understand it all yet.
So, whatever the relative speeds of photons and neutrinos, ie however rapidly they change their positions, they don't make time into a substantial phenomenon we can travel in. Things happen, including us. Because of the constancy of this, and because of our understanding as a reflection of it (ie back to front) we invented time as a measure of change. Just as we invented logic to tame the regularity in change.
Being (things and forces) is there. Thought (our inventions) helps us deal with it.
No Thought without Being. Plenty of Being without Thought.
I'll save Nothing and Becoming for another comment.
3 comments:
To conclude from this post of your's I'd say you'd be implying that there is no constant speed of light ? But it leaves out the possibility of whether matter can travel faster than the speed of light or not. Effectively, that particle would be travelling back in time. In order to make this practicable of course we'll have to contemplate the existence of parallel universes as envisaged by Ramanujan's equations, which is the bulwark of modern String theory. *( Ramanujan of course discovered it in 1882 back when the British hadn't built a modern scientific research centre of any worth in India :-P )
speed of light is constant - but it might not necessarily be the fastest phenomenon. Nothing (matter or otherwise) can travel faster than the fastest particle-wave. And as for reversing the direction of "time" that would mean things being unravelled before they get ravelled. Things happen, they don't unhappen.
There may well be parallel universes, but if there are, our universe will have to be perfectly coherent within that setup - so our physics would have to be a subset of the broader physics. Sort of the same as Newtonian physics is a subset of relativistic physics.
"Things being unravelled before they get ravelled" . What do you make of the phenomenon of Black Holes in the universe :) .
Post a Comment