What are the most disturbing facts about time/space that most people do not know?
Question asked in Quora. Here’s my answer:
The misunderstanding of space and time is what preclude scientists to solve the problems created by progress.
Space and time are indeed in relation, but this relation is antithetical:
In the reference frame of the universe, everything is exclusive; nothing can simultaneously be at the same place at the same time, but everything can move in space. While everything happens at the same instant (given temporal perspectives), but nothing can move in time.
This, in total defiance of Einstein’s relativity (sic), which is as conform to reality — with its need of a spacetime continuum in which space and time are contracting and dilating — as was Ptolemy’s astrological work:
1- with its need of crystalline spheres to prevent the planets to fall on earth (vs. spacetime continuum to explain gravitation);
2- with its epicycles to explain the anomaly of retrograde-motions (vs. space contraction and time dilation to explain the anomaly of the consistency of the speed of light), and
3- with all the other irrelevant concepts of Ptolemy’s (e.g., deferent and equant) to explain the movement of the planets observed from the earth fixed at the center of the universe (vs. all the theories needed to explain quantum reality indirectly observed with instruments).
If I include quantum mechanics along relativity here, it is because the reason these two perspectives cannot be unified — as they must if we want to solve the problems created by scientific progress — is that they both make the same error about time.
“There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with major implications for physics and beyond — from climate change to the economic crisis.” (Lee Smolin in Time Reborn, my bold)
It is this error about time — which we unconsciously made when we had to “objectify” reality to survive in the Savanna millions of years ago— that I am exposing in De evolutionibus res naturae, the PhD dissertation that I am writing in absentia as a 75-yo learned-ignorant outsider of science with two general BA (acquired at 25 and 35) and one unspecialized MA in Zoo-Anthropo-Sociology (at 47) all undertaken to find out why specialists cannot use their knowledge to solve the problem created by progress.
Scientists find what they are looking for. As a wannabe generalist, I manage, as an adult student, to be in as many disciplines as I could in each of my sessions of study in five Universities. One session, I was registered in five different departments. Here’s what I found as an outsider generalist in my academic trek where no one has gone before:
Source: Surviving Progress edited
“If you pay someone to not see the truth he won’t see it.”Michael Lewis:
Specialists (every learned-individual is one) undervalue me because what they see in me is my ignorance, while what they hear me saying when the learned-side of me mentions these facts, is this:
“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.” Buckminster Fuller (Spaceship Earth: Manual of operation, 1965, My bold)
Buckminster is the reason why I decided to become a generalist at the age of 32 while undertaking a second general BA, after an eclectic first BA equivalency and before my unspecialized MA .
My PhD dissertation shows that human science is “subjective” since altogether built on a conception of time specific to us humans. And it argues that it is this conception of time that needs to be transcended now for us to control the force of nature that we are, as Ptolemy’s geocentrism had to be transcended, to discover these forces.
I am working at simplifying its language, since, to be useful, my dissertation must be understandable by all honest minds from 9 and younger to 99 and older. Einstein was saying that “If You Can’t Explain it to a Six Year Old, You Don’t Understand it Yourself.” I am no Einstein, I can only reach a Nine-Year-Old level.
