Stephen P. King (stephenk1@home.com)
Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:13:54 -0500
Dear Robert,
ca314159 wrote:
>
> NIST seems to place time a priori to space ?
>
> Counting oscillations of a specifically prepared
> emission of radiation is the basis of time ?
>
> A theory that defines the relation between space
> and time must also define a new standard of measuring
> the units ?
Yes! We must find ways to model how we can communicate in the first
place. The Newtonian world of isolated systems assumes a God-like
absolute frame and tacitly assumes that information can be gotten
without interaction or entropy consequences.
> SPACE:
> The meter is the length of the path travelled by light
> in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458
> of a second.
>
> TIME:
> The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770
> periods of the radiation corresponding to the
> transition between the two hyperfine levels of the
> ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
>
> http://www.nist.gov
> http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.html
> http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/index.html
Since the duration of a second of defined by a particular frequency of
quantum mechanical transition, that is assumed to be one and the same
for all, the definition of spatial distance is also derived from it.
When we allow for the variation of spectral frequency, as in Weyl's
theory, we see that only "the ratio of two distances would have any
invariant (frame-independent) meaning." But even here the idea of
invarience over frames is only meaningful in the context of
communication. If we could not communicate there would be no way of
deciding which points are being taken as the extremes of the geodesic
that we are measuring the lenght of, we would be right back to Newton's
fallacy.
> --
>
> http://www.bestweb.net/~ca314159/
Later,
Stephen
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