The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli.

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  • #113806
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/551483/the-order-of-time-by-carlo-rovelli/

    Fascinating book. Truly cutting edge. And I loved it. Surprisingly accessible to the “science-challenged” like meself.

    Rovelli’s a Theoretical Physicist. Well, actually, he’s a real physicist, not just theoretically. This is an important distinction, as is the case with Child Psychologists, But, um, well, you guys know what I mean . . .

    My focus (as an adult) has long been Literature, Art, Philosophy and the Humanities in general, which has left me somewhat ignorant of math and science currents. But whenever I find a writer who can relay difficult, complex ideas in non-specialist language . . . I’m quickly enthralled and want to keep going. This is that kind of book. It’s actually poetic at times, oh so wise, well-structured . . . and about the only flaw I found in it is that it’s too short. I wanted more.

    Too many kewl things to list. But I loved the overall premise that there are no “things” in the universe, which would likely upset William Carlos Williams. There are processes and events. We’re processes and events. And everything really is relative, perspectival. And time does not exist, at least as we’ve come to think about time.

    Oh, and did you guys know “time” is different up in the mountains than it is at sea level? I didn’t before reading Rovelli.

    Really, really good book.

    #113807
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Found this interview online.

    Has the audio and transcript:

    Carlo Rovelli — All Reality Is Interaction

    #113811
    Avatar photozn
    Moderator

    Oh, and did you guys know “time” is different up in the mountains than it is at sea level? I didn’t before reading Rovelli.

    I tend to pay some attention to physics, and am always glad when someone new joins in.

    Yes gravity warps time as well as space. So time moves slower the closer it is to a major massive object and its gravity.

    In fact–if we did not know that, then, GPS devices would not work. The satellites that relay info to a GPS device has to calculate the difference between time up there where the satellite is, and time down here on the ground.

    from http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

    Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion.

    Further, the satellites are in orbits high above the Earth, where the curvature of spacetime due to the Earth’s mass is less than it is at the Earth’s surface. A prediction of General Relativity is that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away. As such, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the clocks on the satellites appear to be ticking faster than identical clocks on the ground. A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.

    The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day

    #113813
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    “There are no others.”
    Ramana Maharshi

    “Whenever we try to isolate anything in nature, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.”
    John Muir

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