Plato’s weekend readings, episode 53

readingsHere it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

The awful state of prisons in the UK. And the US is much worse.

Thoughts on the relationship (or lack thereof) between Foucault and Nietzsche.

“Time is everywhere, except in the equations. So, in short, what the hell?”

Is there such a thing as Western civilization? Not really, says Anthony Appiah.

Facebook, echo chambers, and the new media landscape.

155 thoughts on “Plato’s weekend readings, episode 53”

  2. brodix

    Ergh.
    I’m not trying to be the party pooper, but this is a philosophy of science blog, not a philosophy of science fiction blog. Isn’t a large part of the premise to distinguish between science and pseudo-science? Why is time travel an accepted topic of conversation, but mental telepathy isn’t? Most of us carry these wireless radio devices in our pockets and I can see intelligent creatures learning to evolve some form of radio frequency form of communication, as remotely feasible. While time travel is pure unadulterated hand waving.

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  7. synred

    Hi Dan, Special relativity allows only time travel forward. General relativity has n principle has loops (Kip Thorne et al.) that would allow backward travel. This doesn’t mean such loops exist only the they are formally solutions.

    Presumably the ‘wave function’ would have to be continuous around any loop, implying you can’t kill your grandpa though you could be your grandpa (or your father as in Eddy Pus taking incest and inbreedingde to a whole new level).

    A story my granddaughter likes:

    A young lady is walking in the woods.

    She meets an old lady. The old lady hands her a package of plans for a machine. Looking at the plans she sees they are plans for a time-machine. She ‘decides’ to build it. She uses it to travel back in time where she has various adventures. Then one day walking through the woods she meets a young lady and gives her the plans.

    Where did the plans for the time machine come from? [a]

    [a] This mechanism for ‘creation’ in the hands of ‘gods’ is implicit in Eddy Pus.

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  10. synred

    My point just was that it is real physics that has inspired the time

    Agreed. Indeed time travel by pions is done all the forward time in accelerators. Otherwise they would not live long enough for us to accelerate them and crash ’em into stuff.

    Also, it been measured between satellites and the earth and has to be accounted for for GPS to work.

    However, it time travel backward in time that raises the interesting questions.

    You could get a kind of backward travel as follows: take a planet close to a black hole. Then bring it back out. From the point of view of residents of the planet visiting another planet they would have traveled forward in time, but from the point of view of residents of another planet visiting the time traveling planet it might seem like they were going back in time. However, nobody could get back before the first planet approached the black hole and nobody could be their own grandpa or anything. It would be quite a weak form of time travel, merely visiting some place where the clocks has not advanced as much as they had for you, but still they had advanced. Entropy would have increased on both planets.

    Which brings us to a version of a problem with time-travel. Entropy increases with time.
    A statistical effect, but decreases are overwhelmingly likelly. If you travel around a time loop (time localy always increasing) you would have to encounter an entropy decrease to make for a consistent loop. This would seem to me to make such loops very unlikely at macroscopic scales, though they might exist at very small scales in principle (say near singularities).

    Still you are right. Time travel makes interesting stories and raises interesting issues and was not pulled out of thin air (by whoever the Chicago trib writer was who seems to have written the first one).

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  14. SocraticGadfly

    Massimo, I forgot there was an element of time travel in Arrival. The linguistics part is what is the prime attractor. And, doesn’t it seem (if this isn’t too off topic) that a modified Sapir-Whorf is making a partial comeback?

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  15. synred

    Send him back to butcher meat instead?

    Nasty… he’s not that bad. I liked him in Pulp Fiction (though I’ve never managed to watch it continuously from beginning to end).

    12 Monkey’s is rather interesting though more for the plot than the acting.

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  19. brodix

    I realize time travel is implied by some of the math, though the premise is still, as Arthur points out, that different clocks can have different rates, which would also be explained by time as an effect, since different processes generally do occur at different rates in different situations.
    Yet it is still contradictory to the basic physical premise of the conservation of energy. Since the consequence of that is that the dynamic energy manifesting reality does not remain in those prior configurations, but remains as the present state. Even pions being shot into the future is what energy does, from which the math of time is extracted.
    When details are taken out of context, such as abstractions being considered more real than the physical factors from which they are abstracted, all sorts of imaginary possibilities arise.

    The link to prison conditions in the UK led me to this article;
    The closing of the liberal mind
    The folly of the masses has replaced the wisdom of crowds as the dominant theme of our politics.

    Which goes to the point I made as my last comment in the prior post, about how we might want to examine the essential concepts of liberalism and conservatism, to explain why liberals are not good at stable government, as the order, structure and hierarchy inherent to social stability, are contrary to the organic social and intellectual expansionism of liberalism.
    Which again goes to that dichotomy of energy and form.

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  20. brodix

    “Also, it been measured between satellites and the earth and has to be accounted for for GPS to work.”

    Does anyone really think this means the satellite, having the faster clock, has moved into the future of the ground clock, or simply that it is recording a faster rate?
    Such as an animal with a faster metabolic rate will age faster than one with a slower rate.
    The tortoise is still plodding along, long after the hare has died.

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  23. Alan White

    Just back from seeing Arrival this afternoon–excellent movie as Massimo says; I figured it out about 2/3rds through but that’s ok–just look carefully for clues.

    A second to Dan on Primer–though it really has to be seen multiple times (ironically) to get the most out of it.

    SR doesn’t allow for time travel in the usual sense within inertial frames, though it does allow for differential passage of time between them (twin paradox). Godel argued that certain defined geodesics of GR (the Godel metric) gives rise to closed timelike curves, but apparently only asymmetrically to the past–thus making it a math solution of GR roughly consistent with Terminator narratives.

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  26. synred

    12 and Monkey’s had La Jette seem very close. I read there was a French silient film on which 12 Monkey’s was based, but don’t know what it is. Maybe there is common decent.

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  28. brodix

    “What [the main character] finds … is that the past is never as simple as we wish it to be. To return to it is to realize that we never understood it. He also finds–and here it is impossible to miss Marker’s message for his viewers–a person cannot escape from their own time, anyway. Try as we might to lose ourselves, we will always be dragged back into the world, into the here and now. Ultimately, there is no escape from the present.”

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  29. Thomas Jones

    Synred, welcome back hope you are feeling well.

    I liked this comment from you: “Then one day walking through the woods she meets a young lady and gives her the plans.”

    It makes one wonder where time “travel” becomes entangles with veiled concerns about the persistence of identity.

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