the magical play of creation according to modern physics

The Magical Play of Creation According to Modern Physics

Dennis BlejerSchool of Practical Philosophy

and Meditation, Boston

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Abstract

The Creation is a magical play known as the Lila (sport) of the Absolute. Modern physics is consistent with this point of view. The revolution in physics that took place during the 20th century dramatically changed the view of a purely mechanistic (machine-like) and deterministic universe to one full of magic and potentiality. This talk will present the magical mystery of relativistic and quantum physics through illustrative examples.

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Outline Newtonian Physics Relativistic Physics

Special Relativity General Relativity

Cosmology Black Holes Big Bang Dark Matter & Energy The Anthropic Principle and Fine Tuning

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Psalm 9

I will praise thee, O Lord,

with my whole heart;

I will shew forth all thy

marvelous works.

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Special RelativityGeneral Relativity

CosmologyBlack HolesBig BangDark Matter & EnergyThe Anthropic Principle and Fine Tuning

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Three-dimensional Space and Time

X

Y

Z

“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration.” (Newton)

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St. Augustine on Time (~400 A.D.)

“What then is time? If no one asks then I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.”

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Time We don’t know what time is

(St. Augustine), but we do claim to know how to tell time

We tell time with the use of clocks What is a clock?

A clock is essentially a counter Einstein’s light clock – using light to tell time

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Minkoski, 1908

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies there strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” (Spacetime continuum)

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Addition of Velocities

• Why does a javelin thrower run before throwing the javelin?• Because velocities add: by running he imparts a velocity to the javelin that adds to the velocity he imparts when releasing • The speed of light, however, is unaffected by the motion of the source or receiver

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Einstein 1905

Measurements on the speed of light show that it is independent of the relative motion of the observer and the source

Einstein questions Newtonian assumptions about space and time and shows that space-time metrics depend on the relative motion of the observers

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Stationary Light Clock Observed by an Observer at Rest, or a Moving Light ClockObserved by a Moving ObserverA light beam bounces up and down between two mirrors

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Light Clock Observed by a Moving Observer, or a Moving Clock Observed by a Stationary Observer (c is constant)

∆t′ = ∆t/√(1-v2/c2)

v

• Time Dilation: ∆t′ = ∆t/√(1-v2/c2) • For v2/c2 = ¾ (v = 0.87c) , ∆t′ = 2∆t

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Time Dilation, Einstein, 1911

"If we placed a living organism in a box ... one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light".

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Time Dilation of Muons

The muon is an unstable elementary particle with a half-life of 2.2 µs

Rossi and Hall (1941) compared the population of cosmic-ray-produced muons at the top of a mountain to that observed at sea level.

The muon sample at the base was only moderately reduced. The muons were decaying about 10 times slower than if they were at rest with respect to the experimenters.

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• A stationary observer sees the time sequence of events as: (1) AF, (2) BF, (3) AR, (3) BR• The pole is shorter than the barn

• The runner sees the time sequence as: (1) AF, (2) AR, (3) BF, (4) BR• The pole is longer than the barn

• Events are not simultaneous

Lorentz ContractionRelativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, Ta-Pei Cheng, 2010

A pole carrying runner runs through a barn

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Minkowski Spacetime Invariant

• In the Newtonian conception of space and time measuring sticks and clocks are invariants

• In relativistic physics the invariant is Pythagorian distance in 4-dimensional spacetime

s = √(∆R2 – c2∆t2)

s = square root of the distance between two spatial points squared minus the distance light would have traveled squared

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Equivalence Principle

Introducing Stephen Hawking,J. McEvoy and O. Zarate, 1999

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Equivalence of Free Fall in a Gravitational Field and an Inertial Frame of Reference

Astronaut floating in space

There is no experimentthe astronaut can performin empty space to determine which situation he is in

Astronaut in free fall in a uniform gravitational field

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Light Bends in a Gravitational FieldGravity, J.B. Hartle, Addison Wesley

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Bending of Light in a Gravitational Field

• Light bends in a gravitational field• Sir Arthur Eddington verifies in 1919 during an eclipse of the sun• Headlines exclaim “Light caught bending”

• Gravitational time dilation• Clocks run more slowly in stronger gravitational fields than weak ones

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Cassinihttp://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/18268

Bruno Bertotti of the University of Paviaand colleagues in Rome and Bologna measured how radio waves sent from the Earth to the Cassini satellite and back again were deflected by the Sun (B Bertotti et al. 2003 Nature 425 374). Their results, which are accurate to 20 parts in a million, agree with the predictions of general relativity.

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Einstein Ring: A special case of gravitational lensing caused by the exact alignment of the source, lens, and observer resulting in a ring-like structure (Wikipedia)

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Psalm 19The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork

HST NASA

20th Anniversary Image of the Carina Nebula, HST, NASA

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Birth of Black Hole www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole

If the collapsed star is greater than about three times the solar mass, then nothing that we know of in nature can withstand the force of its gravity, and it crumples inexorably into a black hole. It's a mysterious place where gravity has become so powerful that the velocity that an object would need to escape its grip is greater than the 670,000,000-mile-per-hour speed of light, which means that not even light can escape. Hence its simple but deeply evocative name, black hole.

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Static Black Hole

The Photon Sphere occurs at 3/2 the Schwarzschild Radius. It's the only place where light rays can have (very) unstable orbits around the black hole. At the photon sphere the speed you would have to go to stay in orbit is c, the speed of light, some 3 x 108 meters per second.

http://www.gothosenterprises.com/black_holes/static_black_holes.html

The Schwarzschild radius is the radius of a sphere that contains an amount of mass so great that no known force can stop gravitational collapse to a point of infinite density, i.e., a black hole

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Falling into a Non-rotating Black HoleIntroducing the Black Hole, R. Ruffini and J. Wheeler, Physics Today, 1971

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Rotating Black Hole

• Two photon spheres• Ergosphere• Inner and outer event horizons• Ring singularity

http://www.gothosenterprises.com/black_holes/rotating_black_holes.html

Within the ergosphere, spacetime is dragged along in the direction of the rotation of the black hole at a speed greater than the speed of light in relation to the rest of the universe.Wikipedia

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Light Near a Rotating Black Hole

Behavior of light near a Kerr blackhole. The hole is rotating anti-clockwise. The rays drawn in red just barely avoid capture by the hole.

http://www.engr.mun.ca/~ggeorge/astron/lkjh.gif

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RotatingBlack Holes

10 January 2008 — A new study using results from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory provides one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly. The whirling of these giant black holes drives powerful jets that pump huge amounts of energy into their environment and affects the growth of galaxies.

"We think these monster black holes are spinning close to the limit set by Einstein's theory of relativity, which means that they can drag material around them at close to the speed of light," said Rodrigo Nemmen da Silva, lead author of a paper on the new results. "Conditions around a stationary black hole are extreme, but around a rapidly spinning one would be even worse," Nemmen said.

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Supermassive Black Holes

This illustration shows the extreme activity astronomers believe occurs near a supermassive black hole. Matter that is spiraling inward forms a disk swirling around the black hole, and high speed jets of energetic particles are ejected from the poles. The detail shows a computer simulation of the inner region where matter orbits just outside the black hole. The rotation of the disk surrounding the black hole causes one side to brighten. Credit: MIT/NASA/JohnsHopkins/U.Illinois

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The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4261 is one of the twelve brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, located 45 million light-years away

• Visible light image shows hundreds of billions of stars• Radio image shows two jets spanning 88,000 light years• Hubble image shows giant gas and dust disk that fuels a possible black hole

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Milky Way’s Black Holehttp://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/milky-way/the-milky-ways-black-hole

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The Motion of a Star Around the Central Black Hole in the Milky Way http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0226c/

Year

Infra Red Image

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Stars orbiting Supermassive Black Hole in the Center of the Milky Way UCLA Galactic Center Group website

Caption: The orbits of stars within the central 1.0 X 1.0 arcseconds of our Galaxy. Estimates of orbital parameters are only possible for the seven stars that have had significant curvature detected. The annual average positions for these seven stars are plotted as colored dots, which have increasing color saturation with time. Also plotted are the best fitting simultaneous orbital solutions. These orbits provide the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun. 13 years worth of data.

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Sombrero Galaxy: In the Virgo Cluster, about 28 million light years awaySmithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Chandra's X-ray image (in blue) shows hot gas in the galaxy and point sources that are a mixture of objects within the galaxy and quasars in the background. Hubble's optical image (green) reveals the bulge of starlight partially blocked by a rim of dust, which glows brightly in Spitzer's infrared view. It may have a black hole of approximately 1 billion solar masses at its core.

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Chandra Reveals 1000s of Black Holes (March 18, 2007)

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory in orbit is racking up quite a record of groundbreaking discoveries this year. After enabling the verification of Dark Matter earlier this year, Chandra discovered over 1000 Black Holes in a patch of the sky about the size of a paperback book held at arm’s length.

Each of the colored dots in the field left (taken in the constellation Bootes) is a direct image of a black hole that lies at the center of a remote galaxy (hence the name “Active Galactic Nuclei” [AGN]).

http://www.allthebestbits.net/

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How do 2 Black Holes say hello? - With a gravitational wave

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Evidence for Gravitational Waves

The figure (from Weisberg and Taylor (2004)) shows the cumulative shift of periastron time for PSR 1913+16. This shows the decrease of the orbital period as the two stars spiral together. Although the measured shift is only 40 seconds over 30 years, it has been very Accurately measured and agrees precisely with the predictions from Einstein's theory of General Relativity. The observation is regarded as indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves. Indeed, the Hulse-Tayor pulsar is deemed so significant that in 1993 its discoverers were awarded the Nobel prize for their work.

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Einstein equations indicate possibility of black hole formation at the LHCApril 5, 2010, Miranda Marquit

One of the concerns that has been voiced about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is that it could result in the formation of black holes that could destroy the world. While most scientists dismiss claims that anything produced in the LHC would destroy the planet, there are some that think that black formation could be seen with LHC collisions of sufficiently high energy..

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Worm Holeshttp://www.daviddarling.info/childrens_encyclopedia/Build_a_Time_Machine_Chapter4.html

Do Schwarzschild wormholes really exist? When a realistic star collapses to a black hole, it does not produce a wormhole ; The complete Schwarzschild geometry includes a white hole, which violates the second law of thermodynamics ; Even if a Schwarzschild wormhole were somehow formed, it would be unstable and fly apart .

Worm Holes: In science fiction, we often read that a worm hole will connect two places in the universe. The hero in the fiction will go through the worm hole and travel to a distant place in a short time. To our best knowledge, worm hole exists theoretically. However, there are some big drawbacks as a ``tunnel''. The two ends will appear to be black holes to the outsiders. After you travel through the worm hole, you can see what happens outside, but you cannot get out of the black hole at the other end before you are crushed by the singularity. 45

Worm Holes http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schww.html

The Schwarzschild metric admits negative square root as well as positive square root solutions for the geometry.

The complete Schwarzschild geometry consists of a black hole, a white hole, and two Universes connected at their horizons by a wormhole.

The negative square root solution inside the horizon represents a white hole. A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.

General Relativity is time symmetric. It does not know about the second law of thermodynamics, and it does not know about which way cause and effect go. But we do.

The negative square root solution outside the horizon represents another Universe. The wormhole joining the two separate Universes is known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge.

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Hubble Diagrams - Expansionhttp://www.eso.org/~bleibund/papers/EPN/epn.html

• Distance vs. redshift for Type 1a Supernovae• The further away the faster the supernovae are moving• v = H*R, H ~ 7*10e-11/yr• Implies 1/H years ago (14 billion) the universe was a point!• Big Bang – term used by Fred Hoyle in derision for this notion

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Expanding SpaceCosmic Jackpot, Paul Davies

Space is in the universe rather than the universe being in space

The Big Bang happened everywhere, not at one point in space

The Big Bang was the explosion of space, not an explosion in space

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The Evolution of the Universe

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The Composition of the Universe

If 72% of the energy density in the universe is in the form of dark energy, which has a gravitationally repulsive effect, it is just the right amount to explain both the flatness of the universe and the observed accelerated expansion. Thus dark energy explains many cosmological observations at once. NASA

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Galactic Rotation Curves

~α/√R

• Spiral galaxies rotate and the rotation rate is a function of the distance from the center of the galaxy and the mass distribution throughout the galaxy• The observed mass is insufficient to account for the observed rotation curve

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Rotation Curve for the Milky Way http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/isolderadford/galacdm.html

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Seeing Dark Matter in the Andromeda GalaxyVera Rubin, Physics Today, Dec 2006

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Three-Dimensional Mapping of Dark MatterB. Schwarzschild, Physics Today, March 2007

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Dark Energy and Hubble ExpansionB. Schwarzschild, Physics Today, Jan 2007

• Hubble’s Law: v = Hr• Fig a: H vs. time• Fig b: Cosmic expansion rate (H/1+z)

z = 0.5 corresponds to 5 billion yrs agoz = 1.3 corresponds to 9 billion yrs ago

deceleration

acceleration

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Dark Energy and Hubble ExpansionB. Schwarzschild, Physics Today, Jan 2007

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What is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him? Psalm 8.4

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The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and Fine TuningThe Anthropic Cosmological Principle, J. Barrow and F. Tipler

Weak anthropic principle (WAP) (Barrow and Tipler): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."

Strong anthropic principle (SAP) (Barrow and Tipler): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."

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The Anthropic Cosmological Principle Nobel laureate, high energy physicist, Professor

Steven Weinberg, in the journal Scientific American, reflects on "how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values."

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Anthropic Principle – HawkingsWikipedia

As Stephen Hawking has noted, "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

If, for example, the strong nuclear force were 2% stronger than it is (i.e., if the coupling constant representing its strength were 2% larger), while the other constants were left unchanged, diprotons would be stable and hydrogen would fuse into them instead of deuterium and helium. This would drastically alter the physics of stars, and presumably preclude the existence of life similar to what we observe on Earth.

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The Anthropic Cosmological Principlehttp://www.2001principle.net/2005.htm

Dr. David D. Deutsch, Institute of Mathematics, Oxford University: "If we nudge one of these constants just a few percent in one direction, stars burn out within a million years of their formation, and there is no time for evolution. If we nudge it a few percent in the other direction, then no elements heavier than helium form. No carbon, no life. Not even any chemistry. No complexity at all."

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The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

In his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (perhaps the world's most famous cosmologist) refers to the phenomenon as "remarkable." "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers (i.e. the constants of physics) seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life" (p. 125).

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The Antropic Cosmological Principle "For example," Hawking writes, "if the electric charge of

the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded... It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers (for the constants) that would allow for development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty." Hawking then goes on to say that he can appreciate taking this as possible evidence of "a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science (by God)" (ibid. p. 125). 66

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle – John Wheeler "To my mind, there must be at the bottom

of it all, not an utterly simple equation, but an utterly simple IDEA. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, and so inevitable, so beautiful, we will all say to each other, 'How could it have ever been otherwise?'"

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Eugene Wigner

“It is not at all natural that laws of nature exist, much less that man is able to discover them.”

1963 Nobel Laureate in Physics for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles.

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Einstein

• The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

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Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad “He transformed Himself in accordance

with each form: That form of His was for the sake of making Him known.” (2.3.19)

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Backup Slides

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Einstein Field Equation of General Relativity

Distribution of mass causes curvature of spacetime

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Newton, Optics, 1704 … it seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy,

hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, … It seems to me farther, … that they are moved by certain active principles, … such as

would be the causes of gravity, and of magnetic and electric attractions, and of fermentations, if we should suppose that these forces or actions arose from qualities unknown to us, and incapable of being discovered and made manifest. Such occult qualities put a stop to the improvement of natural philosophy, and therefore of late years have been rejected. To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects, is to tell us nothing: But to derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy, though the causes of those principles were not yet discovered.

Now by the help of these principles… variously associated in the first creation by the counsel of an intelligent agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order. And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature; though being once formed, it may continue by those laws for many ages

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2 ˆˆ ˆ2 D L

Sr r C r C r g

m

Trajectory of Table Tennis Ball

Initial velocity Vx = 50 ft/sec

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Relativistic Clock Effects on GPSWikipedia Special Relativity predicts that the frequency of the atomic clocks

moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick more slowly than stationary ground clocks by approximately 7 μs/day, where the orbital velocity is v = 4 km/s.

General Relativity predicts that a clock closer to a massive object will be slower than a clock farther away. Applied to the GPS system, the GPS clocks are faster by about 45.9 μs/day compared to clocks on the Earth.

When combining the time dilation and gravitational frequency shift, the discrepancy is about 38 microseconds per day. Without correction, errors in position determination of roughly 10 km/day would accumulate.

GPS observation processing must also compensate for the rotation of the earth. Ignoring this effect will produce an east-west error on the order of hundreds of nanoseconds, or tens of meters in position.75

Radar Echo from VenusPrinciples of Cosmology and Gravitation, M. Berry, 1976

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LaPlace on Determinism

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes." — Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace

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the magical play of creation according to modern physics

Documents

mathematical time

stationary light clock

moving clock

speed of light

moving light clockobserved

t1v2c2v time dilation

counter einsteins light

quantum physics