Thanks for the question Charles,

It's actually one that has been put forward a few times, at times in accusatory tones :-)) In a nutshell, the answer is a simple no: There are quite very many possibilities as to what the original, time-enabling 'Mind' could be, which I touch upon in the book.

First, of course, resorting to a godhead never explains anything, it just shifts sideways the questions without progressing them a whit :as in: who created the universe ? God . OK, who created God ? And we're back to square one. Requiring a unquestioning leap of faith does not progress understanding, and as such is not on in scientific discourse.

Amongst the few candidates for an "original mind" there are also a software technician if ours is a simulated universe (a hypothesis currently being tested by Martin Savage & team) , or more exotic possibilities (for instance, a physicist who created a black hole.)

Of course , this does not explain an Ur-beginning, but this is where the plot thickens: the large-scale topology of time could be fragmented, with some of the topologies being a bit like a Möbius strip - in which case there would be no beginning and we could have created ourselves (we'd be caught - or trapped - in a lower dimensional eddy of time, separate from the rest of the grand Universe)

This latter explanation would resolve at once, in one fell swoop, the issue of the puzzling (weak) Anthropic Principle.

Of course, there are other explanations (e.g., Time is but a side effect of perceiving only a lower-D universe, etc.)

So the body of explanations is overall much richer than the content-free use of a 'God of the gaps' - explanations drawing God in , as Paul Davies once put it, are notoriously bereft of any explanatory power, even for believers ....

Interestingly, - the mathematical analysis leads exactly to what, in flowery language, the Bible !!!! of all texts, avers in these terms :

'In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word became Flesh'

which means exactly 'In the beginning were thoughts, and thoughts created materiality"

In an early version of the book I had mentioned this in passing, which led an early reader of the book to accuse me quite very frothingly of obscurantism - I learnt my lesson and have steered well clear of any such side references, even meant as mere curios, ever since ....

I certainly do not espouse a view that science either supports or belies the idea of a godhead: it does neither.

Thanks for the question Charles,

It's actually one that has been put forward a few times, at times in accusatory tones :-)) In a nutshell, the answer is a simple no: There are quite very many possibilities as to what the original, time-enabling 'Mind' could be, which I touch upon in the book.

First, of course, resorting to a godhead never explains anything, it just shifts sideways the questions without progressing them a whit :as in: who created the universe ? God . OK, who created God ? And we're back to square one. Requiring a unquestioning leap of faith does not progress understanding, and as such is not on in scientific discourse.

Amongst the few candidates for an "original mind" there are also a software technician if ours is a simulated universe (a hypothesis currently being tested by Martin Savage & team) , or more exotic possibilities (for instance, a physicist who created a black hole.)

Of course , this does not explain an Ur-beginning, but this is where the plot thickens: the large-scale topology of time could be fragmented, with some of the topologies being a bit like a Möbius strip - in which case there would be no beginning and we could have created ourselves (we'd be caught - or trapped - in a lower dimensional eddy of time, separate from the rest of the grand Universe)

This latter explanation would resolve at once, in one fell swoop, the issue of the puzzling (weak) Anthropic Principle.

Of course, there are other explanations (e.g., Time is but a side effect of perceiving only a lower-D universe, etc.)

So the body of explanations is overall much richer than the content-free use of a 'God of the gaps' - explanations drawing God in , as Paul Davies once put it, are notoriously bereft of any explanatory power, even for believers ....

Interestingly, - the mathematical analysis leads exactly to what, in flowery language, the Bible !!!! of all texts, avers in these terms :

'In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word became Flesh'

which means exactly 'In the beginning were thoughts, and thoughts created materiality"

In an early version of the book I had mentioned this in passing, which led an early reader of the book to accuse me quite very frothingly of obscurantism - I learnt my lesson and have steered well clear of any such side references, even meant as mere curios, ever since ....

I certainly do not espouse a view that science either supports or belies the idea of a godhead: it does neither.

@H Chris, modern Ulysses to your journey for Ithaka:

1)"To exist, a multi-variable wave function Ψ (a,b,c ..) demands the prior existence or the establishment of a correlation between these variables. Intervention of an external agent is needed to establish such a correlation when it does not exist prior": No, if a correlation does not exist then don't adopt it and change your theory.

2)"A sane human mind, the most complex object in the universe, is coherent with itself.": No, it is too selfish for us human to accept something like this.

3)"Yet, a unique coherent mind / brain can be shown to live simultaneously in a spectrum of starkly different time zones if relativistic simultaneity applies without further ado.": Have you heard about 'Jet Lag'?

4)Finally, this points to Time itself not being fundamental - not a fundamental variable of the universe.": We agree on this, since time cannot be defined for all processes rigorously.

5)For the wave function: Try to solve the Euler-Lagrange equations for the action W not like Schroedinger did, but otherwise and you will find that the concept of wave function is tighted to the sinusoidal behaviour.

Of course my critics does not want to downsize your detailed work for which I congratulate you, my dear 'Quantum Ulysses of time'.

:-) I like your answer Demetris

The answers to your points are discussed at length in the book (except the one about jet lag), but consider this, as an ansatz:

Because of the way relativistic simultaneity works, if you walk at 4 miles an hour towards the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, your simultaneity with it is one day (24 hours) ahead of your simultaneity if you stand still (do the math).

If you however walk away from it, your simultaneity is one day in the past with regard to what it is when you stand still, and 2 full days with respect to what it is if you walk towards it.

So far, nothing new, it's plain.

But here's the question I have never seen asked anywhere in the literature: what happens if you spin on your body axis ? Then parts of your brain are instantly simultaneous with "24 hours ago", whereas other parts of your brain are simultaneous with "24 hours hence" i.e. in the future from now where you are.

In other words, your brain is simultaneously simultaneous with 'things' in Andromeda 48 hours apart (this is further defined, of course).

I can show in the lab that unless you are a multiple personality, there is one wave function governing your mind/brain. So you are time coherent, and yet fully simultaneous with 'things' that are not simultaneous amongst themselves - indeed, 48 hours apart.

Something has to give.

OK, this is a very short sketch, but you get a feeling of the issues .... Resolving them yields interesting insights into Time.

A supreme being cannot be supported nor rejected from a scientific viewpoint. A supreme being can become acceptable if the expression is replaced by the word ''reality''. Science is based on an a priori belief that there is a reality out there. Many scientists will agree with Kant that this reality out there, which Kant caledl the noumenon, cannot be known in itself. It is not a denial of the validity of the scientific knowledge but a restriction of the scope of such knowlege. This limitation of scope is not a limitation of the progress of science but more an intrinsic limitation that stem from the intrinsic nature of such knowledge. Scientific knowledge is limited to relations among measurables, it is limited to the phenomenal. And the phenomenal depend on the type of body we have, the type of instruments we use. It place science in the realm of the description of the relation we have with the universe. This limitation has allowed Kant to create a space for Freedom and creation in this world without denying any validity to science, without limiting the expansion of science, without creating creating a God of the Gap. The realm of creation, ultimate reality is in no way threaten by any scientific advance. On the contrary if one adopts this kind of vision of science.

Henry Poincaré in "The value of Science", chapter "The measure of Time":

"..psychologic time is given to us and must create scientific and physical time. There the difficulty begins, or rather the difficulties ....". //

"The simultaneity of two events, or the order of their succession, the equality of two durations, are to be so defined that the enunciation of the natural laws may be as simple as possible. In other words, all these rules, all these definitions are only the fruit of an unconscious opportunism”.

@Chris Ransford:

You give your description of relativistic simultaneity as if your brain being simultaneously with 'things' in Andromeda 48 hours apart were a statement about physics. But it is not. Simultaneity at a distance is conventional (within certain limits) as Einstein did not fail to point out in his very first paper on relativity. Your description applies if you insist on using Einstein synchronization, which you are not forced to do at all. General relativity gives you a multitude of different ways to synchronize with events in Andromeda (via arbitrary choice of spacelike hypersurfaces) without any confusion arising about time gaps of 48 hours or whatever. You might want to consider articles on synchronization on a rotating disk where a similar problem arises. I could suggest you one of my own articles for a first reading: K. Kassner, "Ways to resolve Selleri's paradox" Am. J. Phys. 80, 1061 (2012).

@ Klaus, Thanks, a very interesting paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6888.pdf)

Not sure how it quite applies to the above scenario though, whose set-up is rather different from the set-ups discussed in the article.

The main idea however - that the speed of light is synchronization dependent and that only the round-trip speed always averages out to c - is indeed one way to solve certain apparent contradictions within certain experimental setups - however - bear with me, I need to read your article again and let it jell - isn't there here an "a priori" ansatz, whereby so as to eliminate the apparent contradiction, it is beforehand postulated that there is no such contradiction as there appears to be and, working backwards from this, the conclusion now reached (quite inevitably) is that the one-way speed of light is synchronization-dependent ?

In other words, are we not here, beyond the calculations, in effect just replacing one 'assumption' (i.e. that Einsteinian simultaneity holds and represents physical reality in all setups) with another (i.e. that outgoing light speed is synchronization dependent)?

@Chris:

I do not think so. Einstein himself never considered Einstein synchronization as corresponding to "physical reality". In his 1905 paper introducing the special theory, he emphasizes that simultaneity at spatially distant points is established by *definition*, so it can hardly be a matter of reality, since other definitions are possible. His most famous rephrasing of this situation is in his book "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" (Crown, New York, 1952). There he says that the equality of the time it takes for light to go from A to B to that to go from B to A (i.e., the equality of the two one-way speeds of light) is "neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation". So at least in Einstein's view simultaneity of distant events does not have a reality quality. Space-time does have reality. Temporal relationships such as "before" or "after" do, too, if causal connections are possible. But for exact simultaneity there is no generic operational verifiability, due to the fact that there is a maximum signal speed. If it cannot be verified in principle at least, one should not assign physical reality to it.

Of course, this is often misinterpreted in current discussions of relativity. People just don't realize, how radical Einstein's thoughts were. Before Einstein, we had Newton's paradigm of absolute time and, hence, absolute simultaneity. Nowadays, people do lip service to relativity of simultaneity, they accept that differently moving observers may have different notions of simultaneity. But as soon as the observer is fixed, they fall back in the old mental frame, assuming that the simultaneity of this observer at least has objective value. (It does, but only after a convention defining what precisely is meant by simultaneity. But this is the same kind of objectivity that a gauge field has after fixing the gauge. A potential is defined once its zero is set. But that does not mean that the potential suddenly becomes a real quantity. The field is real. Anybody who changes the definition of potential will still get the physics right. Anybody who changes the definition of simultaneity, for example by requiring all observers to have the same simultaneity, i.e. introducing a preferred time, may still get the physics right. Lorentzian ether theory is known to make empirically equivalent predictions to special relativity.)

However, even simultaneity of a *given* observer is not uniquely fixed by physics. There is still some choice. Synchronized time is a gauge field, in modern language. (A consequence is that velocities are also gauge fields, i.e. not defined before the synchronization has been fixed. Round-trip velocities are gauge independent.)

As to the applicability of rotating frames to the scenario you discussed: The fact that you have a 48 h gap between events in Andromeda simultaneous with your left or right brain half is due to a bad choice of time coordinate(s). When you use Einstein synchronization for both halves of your brain, you either work with two different inertial frames and you have to specify how times measured in one transform to the other. Then the 48 h difference would be an artifact of describing things in two frames. Or else you set up a rotating frame, encompassing these two inertial systems as instantaneous comoving frames. This would allow you to obtain a coherent description of both events, but in rotating frames, Einstein synchronization has only restricted applicability. For example, you cannot synchronize "around a circle" without introducing a contradiction, which takes the form of a time gap, i.e., two times assigned to the same event. This case is covered in my paper. Your use of Einstein synchronization is not one along the angular coordinate but along two lines that are not precisely radial in the rotating frame (because you are not synchronizing with the center of rotation but with the two halves of your brain). In fact, those lines are not even straight, they are spirals, because in your rotating frame Andromeda moves roughly 2 pi times 2.5 million light years about you during the time of one turn. Inertial systems cannot be at rest in that frame at that distance. They have to move at a huge average speed plus minus c. So rotating coordinates seem to be not very practical to describe the situation, to say the least. (The huge velocity is a mere coordinate effect.) In a "normal" rotating frame (used to describe matter that is rotating itself, such as a rotating disk), radial synchronization of clocks is not possible for standard clocks, due to time dilation. If each clock is made to run fast by a factor compensating for time dilation, then radially, Einstein synchronization is possible.

But there is no guarantee that Einstein synchronization remains non-contradictory in your scenario. You need to synchronize along a complicated path and if you close it, your clocks may not all be synchronous.

Thanks Klaus,

Let me reread your paper - for the sake of exercise, I defined synchronization as non contradictory, the way I think you do, and then wrote out the few calculations- if my quick and dirty calculations are correct - the math yields the selfsame conclusion that you indicate, to wit, that the outgoing light must have a different c in different directions - unless I'm mistaken in my analysis, it's a plain straightforward consequence of defining synchronization as set .

It seems therefore that I end up with a case of swapping one question mark for another one, and that the math is neutral - the ultimate interpretation not being steered by the math but guided by whatever apparent contradiction one feels most comfortable retaining.

I'm not entirely sure how or why, from a physical perspective, light - self-induced sinusoidal mag & electrical fields - would so conveniently assume different speeds under these conditions. Although I'm aware that Ockham's razor does not necessarily mean much, I'm not sure what its application between these two alternatives would say here.

Would you have further papers on the subject you could refer to ? Many thanks

The point is that one-way velocities are not even definable prior to a choice of clock synchronization. So it is not convenience that makes light assume or not assume different velocities but our definition of simultaneity. In Einstein's approach to special relativity the back and forth velocities of light are equal by definition and this definition is possible because of the universal round-trip velocity (which can be measured using a single clock and is therefore synchronization independent). There are no logical circles here. It is simply that before defining how to determine simultaneity of distant events, one cannot properly define measurements depending on differences in distant clock settings. So synchronization is logically prior to velocity definition.

A paper in which I find synchronization issues explained well is: G. Rizzi, M.L. Ruggiero, A. Serafini, "Synchronization gauges and the principles of special relativity", Found. Phys. 34, 1835-1887 (2004). Pretty long, but good. An early discussion is in A. Grünbaum, "Logical and Philosophical Foundations of the Special Theory of Relativity", Am. J. Phys. 23, 450-464 (1955).

In my dimensional analysis of the known physical constants (Secrets of the Aether), I showed that all material reality arose from a split in the Singularity, whatever the Singularity is. This split gave rise to something I call the Gforce and strings of mass. Gforce is a reciprocal force that gives rise to space and the fundamental forces of nature (complete with a fully quantified unification of the fundamental forces); strings of mass are something that coincide with the observation of dark matter. The Gforce and dark matter have a reciprocal relationship to each other, just as do time and frequency.

In addition to the split that gave rise to Gforce and dark matter, there was another orthogonally related split that gave rise to two distinct manifestations of charges, the electrostatic charge and a magnetic charge. These two types of charges are also reciprocal to each other. The physics of these two types of charges is well-established even though the available data is interpreted differently. In other words, modern physics has incorrectly interpreted the known data and led science into many dead end tangents.

The qualities of the Gforce are such that it is both quantum and all-pervading. Whatever the Gforce is, it drives the existence of each quantum of space (Aether unit) and also drives the continuance of the fundamental forces, which is why they appear to operate at such great distances. One could look at the incredibly large value of Gforce (1.21 x 10^44 newton) and see that it drives each quantum of space and holds the entire Universe together by driving the fundamental forces and wonder what to call it? It certainly does fit the description of "Creator God" as described in ancient literature. However, humans have the tendency to add human qualities to everything we see. Thus the fact becomes the basis for myth, and the myth seems believable.

Our human weakness should not blind us from the truth. A proper analysis of the known physical constants does reveal a creator "force" that both creates and maintains the physical Universe.