From: ucap22w@ucl.ac.uk (Martin S T Watts)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: TIME HAS INERTIA
Date: 12 Nov 92 20:15:07 GMT
Organization: Bloomsbury Computing Consortium


Hello Again Prof. Abian,

My profuse apologies - after re-reading my original posting I now see that
it was so faulty grammatically as to be rendered almost unintelligible.
Please find below a corrected version of this posting, which I sincerely hope
you will find time to reply to. Sorry for having wasted your time.

Again, if you could reply by means of editing my posting it would be very much
appreciated. It would also enable you explicitly to point out grammatical
mistakes, which would be beneficial to me.

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Hello Prof. Abian,

I'm afraid that I've not managed to catch the whole of this discussion, so
please forgive me if I'm making requests which you've already covered in
previous postings. I'm not sure quite what to make of your arguments at
present, but I'd perhaps be clearer about them if you'd care to address the
following points.

1)  "The tendency of maintaining the status-quo, Reaction to provocation and
                The tendency of maintaining again a status-quo."

This is a difficult point to address, not least because its construction is
grammatically faulty. Since you obviously consider it a rather grand statement
could you trouble yourself to express it in correct English? That would be
appreciated.

Neither in this first maxim do you explain to *what* it applies. 
Whilst ambiguity remains it might be foolhardy for me to comment, but, from
what I've read of the discussion, it seems as if you think it applies as well
to human behaviour as it does to sub-atomic processes. Which occurred to you
first, and why do you think it pertinent to correlate the two like this?

As a physical law, is it not just a clumsy restatement of Newton's 2nd law?
As a law of human behaviour, is it really at all original? Is it not what
most people assume of the majority of people, that is, that the human being 
is a fairly conservative sort of chap, by and large. In short, what does it
explain that is not currently well known?

2)    TIME HAS INERTIA  and some energy is lost to move Time forward  

Again, this is rather difficult to address because it would seem to require
some redefinition of the word "inertia". In all other contexts in which I've
heard the word used, it relies partially for its definition on the fact that
time is moving forward pretty much continuously. How is it possible to assess
whether, or how much, inertia a tonne weight has if we can't say anything
about the evolution of its spatial coordinates with time? Certainly, our common
definition of inertia has no explicit dependence on time, but our conviction
that inertia as a property exists relies rather heavily on certain assumptions
about it. Perhaps you could explain relative to what similar concept time
itself possesses inertia.

I think, however, that I see vaguely what you mean, but how is it verifiable
and why is it worth publicising? Unfortunately, we're rather bound up in this
time concept - how would we know if time sped up, slowed down or even stopped?
Our thought, and all other bodily, processes obey the laws of thermodynamics
as these laws are related to time, so I don't think we're really in a position
to be stating what happens outside this context. Conjecturing, maybe, but
certainly not proffering as a supposedly scientific conclusion.

3)  E = mcc  (Einstein)    must be replaced by    E = m(0) exp(-At) (Abian)

Again you would seem to be at fault in your expression of a (boldly quanti-
tative this time) new law. For a start, a high school student could inform
you that it is not dimensionally correct. You might retort that energy and
mass are equivalent, but Einstein took the trouble to ensure his equation
balanced - why can't you? For another thing, they are not. The one thing that
you give Einstein credit for is something he probably never said. As Hermann
Bondi has pointed out [Physics Bulletin _38_ (1987) p62], in all known physical
processes energy and mass are in fact conserved separately. Energy has mass
is a more useful statement than energy and mass are equivalent.

But why *must* Einstein's equation be replaced by your new law of exponentially
decaying energy? What observational grounds do you have for putting your
hypothesis on such a firm mathematical footing? Sure, this may turn out 
eventually to be a useful law (though I have my doubts) but so might
E(t) = [A/t + B/(t*t)]. How are you in a position to say that your conjecture
is better than mine?

A final point. You've said more than once that you don't like jokes of a 
practical or theoretical nature. Does this equate to having no sense of humour?
If so, my experience is that those with no sense of humour usually have a 
limited capacity for self-criticism, a quality which I think most great 
scientific workers have had in copious amounts. If you have aspirations towards
greatness, do you think this is something that might be worth working on?

I'd be grateful if you could reply to this article by editing it. It would
make life easier for me, and for anybody else interested in reading your
comments. Many thanks in advance.

Martin Watts.
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Newsgroups: sci.physics