| Session
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Track 4
|
| Duration
|
1 hour
|
| Date/Time
|
07 May 2025 16:00 GMT
|
| 9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT
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| 5:00pm BST/6:00pm CEST
|
| Convener
|
Ravi Sharma
|
Agenda
Terry Bollinger Bottom-Up Time Construction as a Unifying Physics Theme
- Abstract:
- The ontology of modern physics is largely an instance of an ontology of mathematics developed in the 1700s, centuries before the advent of special relativity and quantum theory. Excessive reverence for this often computationally intractable mathematical ontology initiated two centuries during which the ontologies of classical physics dominated our understanding of the real world. The cost of this approach was that it enshrined as continuants concepts that we now know unequivocally to exist experimentally only as asymptotic-limit occurrents that, at the particle level, are often exceedingly short. The concept of a “point-like particle” is instructive. Over a century of experimental quantum mechanics data universally forbids this concept from existing as anything more than a mostly short-lived, always approximate, and energetically costly localization of a persistent bundle of characteristic quantum numbers such as mass, charge, and spin. Disregarding such profoundly anti-point data out of traditional deference to 1700s mathematics ontologies creates noise and misdirection that has prevented new, data-driven ontologies from emerging. In particular, using point-like entities as the “obvious” continuants of physics, rather than as short-lived occurrents in which continuant bundles of quantum properties participate, induces unwarranted belief in levels of detail never found in the actual data. Minkowski’s adamant four-dimensionalism, which contrasted sharply with Einstein’s initial pragmatic focus solely on real clocks and real rulers in three-dimensional space, is an excellent example of the consequences of this inattention to data. In this talk, I propose that returning to Einstein’s far more data-driven early ontology of clocks and rulers provides an ontological approach that helps unify, rather than fray, the many domains of physics.
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