Sunday, November 30, 2008

What is (the) time?

After seeing Sean revise his view on Templeton funded events and submitting an essay to the FQXi essay contest it seems that this is now officially PC.

So, nothing stands in my way to submit my own.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As you hint at the end of your essay, there are some arguments against time as the reading of a clock:

1. Clock time is only defined on the clock's worldline.

2. Reading time means measuring the location of a dial. But then you have no idea what the dial's speed is, since Heisenberg tells us that
[x, v] = i hbar/M,
where M is the clock's (or dial's) mass.

3. You can avoid this uncertainty by letting the clock's mass go to infinity. In the presence of gravity, the clock will then immediately collapse into a black hole.

In arXiv:0811.0900v1 [hep-th] I took these objections seriously, and introduced a generalization of QFT which does not only describe the quantized fields, but also a physical observer with quantum dynamics.