A week or so ago the blogosphere lit up with news of a bright spark to rival Einstein. Peter Lynds, a 27-year-old with no academic affiliation had achieved the impressive feat of having his paper about the nature of time not only published in a peer-reviewed journal but also publicly praised by some professional physicists.
However, though there were lots of postings on this news, I didn't see any from people who'd actually read the paper. Perhaps this is partly because the original (more general) paper seems to be behind the subscriber-only access system of the journal in question. But Lynds' follow-up paper (which concentrates on much narrower implications for Zeno's Paradox and related puzzles) is freely available online. So I took a look.
The first thing that struck me about it was the quality of the writing, which is poor. It's full of typos, uses some strange turns of phrase that aren't quite English and, when it gets to the really important parts, becomes bogged down in dense blocks of opaque text. For example:
After all, before the second half of the distance can be travelled, one must cover the first half. But before that distance can be travelled, the first quarter must be completed, and before that can be done, one must traverse the first eight [sic], and so on, and so on to infinitum [sic].
and:
Zeno would of [sic] known full well...
and:
One could certainly also assert that there were no interval in time, and so if one wishes, there were a precise static instant underlying a physical process, without it being dependent on there actually being interval: as is the case with the hypothetical absence of mass and energy, and the resulting absence of 3 spatial dimensions [sic, sic, sic, sic, ...].
But these are signs of incompetent editing as well as authoring. And, in any case, they shouldn't be allowed to distract us from any interesting ideas contained in the text. The trouble is, I can't find many.
The main claim is as follows:
[I]n all cases a time value indicates an interval of time rather than a precise static instant in time at which the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude would theoretically be precisely determined.
As a result, a body in relative motion does not have a precisely determined relative position:
[T]his is not associated with the preciseness of the measurement, a question of renormalizing infinitesimals or the result of quantum uncertainty... It simply does not have one. There is a very significant and important difference.
Mmm... maybe. But this approach isn't required to explain Zeno's Paradox. That depends only on understanding that an infinite series can sum to a finite quantity (resulting in a finite time for Achilles to overtake the tortoise). Lynds dismisses this approach as a mathematical fiction. I disagree.
Lynds bolder claim is that his approach is required to allow any change at all. To me, it boils down to saying that any physical quantity that is changing with time has an degree of indeterminacy associated with it's value during any specified time interval; the smaller the interval (and slower the change) the less the indeterminacy. This is a trivial statement. Lynds seems to be claiming that, on the contrary, his statement is profound. But if it is then I have missed the reason why.
In any case, none of this deals with the really interesting things about time, which relate to its qualitative differences from space (something I've written about before. In my (admittedly limited) experience, better places to read about the nature of time are:
On the other hand, if you want a more prosaic, but no less entertaining, discussion of time, read this piece by David Adam in The Guardian is well worth a read.
Posted by timo at August 11, 2003 07:40 AM | TrackBack