Prior to Albert Einstein’s two theories of relativity, space was conceived as an inert, albeit multidimensional, frame of reference. It did not appear to move, but instead objects including earth moved through it. In the wake of Einstein’s revolution, physicists and eventually the general public came to see that space, along with time, was a lively, dynamic entity whose properties depended upon the relative motions of observers, either human or taking the form of instrumentation. Furthermore, in General Relativity, the very shape of space could be modified by a nearby strong gravitational field.
This was soon shown to be not just theoretical speculation. Observed data, first collected by Sir Arthur Eddington’s observation of a solar eclipse in 1919, verified the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.
Traditionally, space was conceived as a boundless, static, three-dimensional frame of reference that is the abode of all real objects. Following Einstein, it became more appropriate to regard time as a fourth dimension of space, perpendicular to the traditional X, Y and Z axes. This geometry was conceived by Hermann Minkowski, who elaborated on the work of his former student, Einstein, creating what has come to be known as “Minkowski Spacetime”.
The great innovation was that Minkowski spacetime facilitated a better understanding of the Lorenz geometry inherent in Einstein’s Special Relativity.
By way of background, we must revisit a great seventeenth-century controversy. The realists, exemplified by Isaac Newton, held that space is absolute, existing as an unchanging independent entity regardless of the presence within it of any matter.
This view was opposed by Gottfried Leibniz, for one, who believed that space is an epiphenomenon, created by the collection of interrelations between objects. This stance has been called idealism, and it was further elaborated by Immanuel Kant, who said that space, like time, cannot be empirically perceived, but instead is an element that humans use to structure our experiences. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he stated that space and time are subjective pure a priori forms of intuition.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, investigating the implications of non-Euclidean geometry, sought to examine space empirically to see if it was, indeed, curved. He wanted to measure the angles of an enormous triangle, and ended up measuring mountain-top triangles in Germany. The results were inconclusive.
Soon thereafter, Henri Poincaré countered that such empirical evidence in principle could not be gathered due to the absence of a reference space that would be required. Going a step further, he asserted that which of the two geometries was applicable was a mere convention.
Time is more or less inscrutable. We feel its presence and effects but it is impossible to imagine what it would be like to stand outside it.
A lot of this reduces to language. It is meaningless to ask, outside of a purely psychological perspective, if time ever slows down or speeds up. That question would require another temporal scale by which it could be measured.
A concept called bracketing, devised by Edmund Husserl, comes in handy here. Husserl will always be synonymous with epistemology. This branch of philosophy may be characterized as a systematic program of describing experiences, objects and entities of any type without resorting to metaphysical and theoretical speculations. Husserl devised an ingenious technique he called bracketing by which is meant suspending the natural attitude. In this way philosophy could become an exact science.
To this end, Husserl defined phenomenology as a science of consciousness, as opposed to a science of empirical things. Husserl’s first major work on phenomenology, Logical Investigations, consisting of two volumes, appeared in 1900. In the first volume, he criticizes psychologism, in which psychology plays the central role in describing facts, relations and objects. In the second volume, which is longer and far more comprehensive, Husserl conducts six descriptive investigations into the realm of consciousness. He focuses on:
Expression and meaning
Universals
Parts and wholes
Structure of meaning
Nature of intentionality
Interrelations of truth, intuition and cognition
Husserl’s second major work on phenomenology, Ideas (1913), provides a method in the realm of thought whereby an individual employing the phenomenological perspective can develop an unprejudiced (this is one of his key words) justification for basic views on the world and on the subjective participant in order to explore rational interconnections. Such a restructuring of the cognitive process is necessary if one is to acquire a realistic perspective.
Returning to the subject of time, we can use Husserl’s notion of bracketing to suspend all metaphysical speculations and talk only in terms of a phenomenology of time, taking care not to fall into the trap of psychologism.
The Big Bang origin of the universe is, at least at present, an accepted fact. After all, if celestial objects are moving apart, they must have originated at one point. Such a singularity was probably unchanging and without motion. It is said that a primordial explosion took place, creating time and space references so that matter and energy could expand. Exacting observational evidence indicates that this expansion is accelerating.
The question arises, in the static singularity, about the sort of ticking clock that established the schedule for the primeval explosion to occur. The answer seems to be that there was no such clock or calendar, and actually time along with space was created, beginning at that event.
The closest observation seems to indicate that time conforms to a one-way arrow, emerging from a remembered past and pointing toward a future that is subject to speculation but not definite knowledge. We have never experienced a reversal of time and a reason or mechanism for that to happen cannot be imagined. Moreover, there are theoretical reasons such as the infamous “Grandfather Paradox” that would preclude such an occurrence.
What, then, other than a purely psychological narrative, can be said of time? The closer we look at it, the more elusive any exact description of its inner nature becomes.
Isaac Newton believed that time is an intrinsic property of the universe, making it possible for events to occur in sequence. According to this view, known as realism, if that were not the case, all events would occur simultaneously. This interpretation is opposed by the idealist standpoint, espoused by Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, which holds that time and space do not exist independently, but are products of how we represent things.
Quantization of time is the stance that time consists of discrete bits that cannot be further subdivided. This non-intuitive view is not supported in Einstein’s relativity, which is not yet integrated with quantum mechanics. The Planck unit of time, 5.4 X 10-44 seconds, is a limit at which accepted physical theories are not applicable. It is believed that Planck time is the smallest unit of time that could in principle be measured.
Lev says
SRT is completely erroneous since it is based on the wrong kind of transformations: they have lost the scale factor characterizing the Doppler effect. First, Lorentz considered a more general form of transformations (with a scale factor), but then he, and also Poincare and Einstein equated it 1 without proper grounds. Their form was artificially narrowed, the formulas became incorrect. This led to a logical contradiction of the theory, to unsolvable paradoxes. For more details, see my brochure “Memoir on the Theory of Relativity and Unified Field Theory” (2000):
http://vixra.org/abs/1802.0136