Spacetime

Intentionally mistating Misner, et.aJ. s quote with which we began this section, one is tempted to speculate, instead, that Neither matter nor space tells the other how to act, for both are nothing other than constructs of information. There is no such thing as spacetime, only information. Sometimes it acts like space, sometimes it acts like matter and sometimes it simultaneously acts as both. In many ways, this would be an ideal marriage between the central lesson of gravity - namely, the proposition that spacetime is not just a static backdrop on top of which dynamics takes place but is an active coupled participant in that dynamics - and the notion that, underneath it all, fundamentally, all is information. 

The idea that matter and spacetime might be built from the same stuff has been entertained, in a variety of guises, many times, beginning with Einstein himself. Einstein was unhappy with the models of particles that were prevalent in his... 

Kaplunovsky and Weinstein [kaplu85j develop a field-theoretic formalism that treats the topology and dimension of the spacetime continuum as dynamically generated variables. Dimensionality is introduced out of the characteristic behavior of the energy spectrum of a system of a large number of coupled oscillators. 

Among its many useful features is the ability to simulate both discrete and continuous CA, run in autorandoinize and screensaver modes, display ID CAs as color spacetime diagrams or as changing graphs, display 2D CAs either as flat color displays or as 3D surfaces in a virtual reality interface, file I/O, interactive seeding, a graph-view mode in which the user can select a sample point in a 1-D CA and track the point as a time-series, and automated evolution of CA behaviors. 

The free theory for the quench models is provided by the potential (4), where A = 0 and m2(t) changes signs either instantaneously or for a finite period. In the Minkowski spacetime, we can apply the LvN method simply by letting R = 1. Before the phase transition (rrii = (mg + m2)1/2), all the modes are stable and oscillate around the true vacuum ... 

If this linear analysis is to be used, the experimental conversion-spacetime data should first be taken at several pressure levels. Using the C2 analysis alone, then, the plots of Ct versus total pressure should be made for a preliminary indication of model adequacy. If several models are found to provide near-linear Cx plots, the complete linear analysis using the C2 plots should assist in the discrimination among the remaining rival models. If a model is adequate, both the Cl and C2 points should be correctable by a straight line with a common intercept, as demanded by Eqs. (85) and (86). If only one model is found to be adequate following the initial Cl analysis, the complete Ct and C2 analysis should still be carried out on this model to verify its ability to fit the high conversion data. 

Em always fascinated by scientific and cultural studies of the nature of time and space. Ever since H. G. Wells 1895 publication of The Time Machine— which described a four-dimensional spacetime with duration being a dimension like height, width and thickness—people have been wondering why we can t travel in time as we do in space. If time is like space, then in some sense the past may literally still exist back there as surely as New York still exists even after I have left it. If we could travel in time as easily as we do in space, imagine how our lives would be... 

Sometimes time seems to disappear entirely from Proust s work. We spend hundreds of pages examining the nature and ideas of a character or a situation, while there is minimal flow of time. As Jonathan Wallace writes in Proust s Ruined Mirror In Proust s novel, time is a river in which the characters swim it tends to carry them downstream, but like fish, they occasionally reverse themselves and struggle against its flow. Proust s greatest desire was to travel through time, to recapture the past with its lost memories and people. In some ways/ Search of Lost Time resembles a chunk of spacetime that contains past, present, and future. In... 

Many modem novelists, philosophers, madmen, and provocateurs deeply believe that time is not what we think it to be. Novelist Philip K. Dick, for example, suggested that time on Earth has stopped in the year 50 AD, and he gives concrete reasons for his theory in his breathtaking essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn t Fall Apart Two Days Later, in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon. In short, he believes that our world today is not taking place in the 21st century, and we are deceived and live in a counterfeit reality lodged in a spacetime pocket in 50 AD. He writes ... 

I sometimes can shape my dreams and force content into them. Tonight I will float along the Vivonne River by the Guermantes way. I visualize it now. My tranquil life seems like an afterlife or a dream— unreal. My friends who try this mental exercise come to believe that life can be repeated, refined, and relived with slight alterations and sadness avoided. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the Vivonne River and in the eyes of humans is no more than that a playing of illusions in spacetime. 

The many-worlds theory suggests that a being existing outside of spacetime might see all conceivable forks, all possible spacetimes and universes, as always having existed. How could a being deal with such knowledge and not become insane A God would see all Earths those where no inhabitants believe in God,... 

Bear, G. (1995) Eon. New York Tor. Humans discover a hundred-kilometer-long asteroid that extends inside billions of miles Built by humans thirteen centuries in our future, the asteroid is fashioned out of artificially twisted spacetime and functions as a tunnel into hyperspace. As one travels down... 

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