Miningman Jones-- I thought about that very aspect long and hard. Almost every night I think of the Einsatzgruppen herding women and children into barns in the countryside, then firing rounds into the barn, hurling in bombs and the setting it on fire. Playing games with bullets showing off how they can put two heads together and with one bullet kill them both. Followed by big drinking binge and laughter. It is beyond belief. ( 90% of my family suffered this fate). Even a Shakespeare could not find the right words. It is impossible to reconcile that with places in space-time. My only way is to put my faith in that time and death actually do not exist, it is something made up by fallen angels, the Devils and demons. That this is not a part of creation and is not real, it is all an illusion, that the reality is there is no such thing as time and death. Someday we can return to the original creation, all living things through out all of time. .... and you can go trackside and watch the S1 whiz buy, and talk to Pennsy about streamlining a few more locomotives and then meet other Forum members just to hang around the roundhouse.
Jones-- I thought about that very aspect long and hard. Almost every night I think of the Einsatzgruppen herding women and children into barns in the countryside, then firing rounds into the barn, hurling in bombs and the setting it on fire. Playing games with bullets showing off how they can put two heads together and with one bullet kill them both. Followed by big drinking binge and laughter. It is beyond belief. ( 90% of my family suffered this fate). Even a Shakespeare could not find the right words. It is impossible to reconcile that with places in space-time.
My only way is to put my faith in that time and death actually do not exist, it is something made up by fallen angels, the Devils and demons. That this is not a part of creation and is not real, it is all an illusion, that the reality is there is no such thing as time and death.
Someday we can return to the original creation, all living things through out all of time.
.... and you can go trackside and watch the S1 whiz buy, and talk to Pennsy about streamlining a few more locomotives and then meet other Forum members just to hang around the roundhouse.
I'm sorry to hear what your family went through during the war, Vince. My grandfather also lost a lot of things he valued during the war (and the chaos directly caused by WWII afterward), including my father's younger brother. Your faith is inspiring and brought me some comfort! I wish I woke up tomorrow morning and would be told by a group of angels that "It was just a prank, Jones! No bad thing really happened..." or something much better than this. And YES! I will see the S1 arrive Pittsburg with 14 16-wheel betterment cars behind her; you guys will be celebrating the end of "the prank" with me in the lounge car...
Jones 3D Modeling Club https://www.youtube.com/Jones3DModelingClub
.... and you can go trackside and watch the S1 whizz by, and talk to Pennsy about streamlining a few more locomotives and then meet other Forum members just to hang around the roundhouse.
Miningman We cannot return to our past moments because of the geometry of space-time itself. We are compelled by the 'arrow of time' inexorably into the future. BUT! ... as I previously stated " Just because we can't go back in time does not mean the past isn't out there. As Professor Brian Cox states: Taking Einsteins universe at face value: and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, it’s our best theory of space and time – then this picture of space-time, with events placed within it, suggests something wonderful, and I think quite magical. ‘If I leave a place in space, then it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it, and in space-time, if I leave an event it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it. ‘So, that suggests that all those summers you spent with your mum and dad, or that first Christmas with your grandparents long ago, all those most precious memories of people and places, all those summers and winters past, and seasons yet to come, are out there. ‘Somewhere in space-time.’
BUT! ... as I previously stated " Just because we can't go back in time does not mean the past isn't out there.
As Professor Brian Cox states: Taking Einsteins universe at face value:
and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, it’s our best theory of space and time – then this picture of space-time, with events placed within it, suggests something wonderful, and I think quite magical. ‘If I leave a place in space, then it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it, and in space-time, if I leave an event it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it. ‘So, that suggests that all those summers you spent with your mum and dad, or that first Christmas with your grandparents long ago, all those most precious memories of people and places, all those summers and winters past, and seasons yet to come, are out there. ‘Somewhere in space-time.’
Good memories might last forever and available for "human" who have the ability to review them, but how about all the injustice and misfortune that many people have been trying to forget them (or still fighting against them)? From all the victims in the Nazi concentration camps to the Pullman Porter who was distastefully insulted; war crimes, broken families and dreams, incurable diseases ... I wish all these unnecessary negative things happened throughout our jaw-dropping horrific history, the so-called human civilization, all those discourage things that probably took the life of American journalist Iris Chang, would have never happened. But that would have made our history looked like a fairytale, something not "Human" enough; nothing wrong with that though.
The past is alive as long as your memory survives.
More to add to this topic: We CAN wave at Niagara's and ride the Olympian.
Step by step easy to understand, hopefully.
Everything in the universe is in motion, yet it feels as if we are standing still. This appears to be such a simple observation but the study of motion lies at the very foundation of modern physics.
Einstein thought long and hard about motion. His work lead him to merge space and time into a unified whole in a 'fabric' of the universe called space -time. It is only in the last century that we discovered how deeply time and motion are intertwined. The seperation of space and time is false.
This leads to the astonishing conclusion that the division of time into Past, Present and Future is an illusion. Our intuition is wrong. Space and time are stranger than we could have possibly imagined.
We live on a spinning ball of rock hurtling through the universe. Our seasons follow the clockwork of the solar system with the Earth returning to the same place every year EXCEPT we don't only travel through space, we also travel through time. This is a consequence of motion that effects us all, our journey into the future.
With every passing moment we move through a different place in the universe, not just in space but also in time. We are hurdling into the future at the speed of light. It is that motion that we experience as the passage of time.
As the Earth moves through space-time its orbit traces out a spiral ( not a helix, simulations show a spiral, but not critically important on this point, potato-potatoe ) as it circles the sun and races to the future.
It never returns to the same place because each moment is a different location in the fabric of the universe. As the Earth moves relentlessly forward into the future so must we.
We cannot return to our past moments because of the geometry of space-time itself. We are compelled by the 'arrow of time' inexorably into the future.
Whoops! I corrected that "1963" typo Johnny, thanks for pointing it out!
Yes, maybe Pickett's goofy grin in the film "Gettysburg" was a bit of dramatic license, but it was a pretty good scene just the same.
Some have said Pickett's animosity towards Lee didn't stem from Gettysburg, but from Pickett's being relieved from command after Five Forks in 1865. Pickett was at a shad bake when Sheridan attacked and broke Pickett's section of the Petersburg defensive line, precipitating Lee's retreat to Appomattox and surrender.
Longstreet said afterward Sheridan attacked with such overwhelming force there was nothing Pickett could have done to stop it, but Lee didn't see it that way.
Wayne
Thanks Dude. It's fun to put a little magic and uplift into these threads at the end of the year.
Monsieur Mike adds this to the timescale:
Posted by Miningman on Saturday, December 28, 2019 7:15 PM
I'm reminded of Luke's final living words to Leia.
"No one's ever really gone"
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
MiningmanOvermod--- So when your granddaughter 235 generations from now arrives and picks you up to take you trackside to see that Niagara and wave at the engineer don't be to surprised if I'm already there waiting for you because I asked her to fetch you!
No one will be more delighted than I will.
Flintlock76 I'm getting spaced-out by all this. Let me pop another Faulkner quote on everyone, one of my favorites... "Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs! Snobs are too busy being snobs to get in anyone else's business." And the absolute best of them all (abridged)... "In every fourteen-year-old Southern boy's mind it's not quite 2 o'clock on July third, 1963. It hasn't happened yet..." Referring to Pickett's Charge, of course. I have to confess, every time I watch the movie "Gettysburg," and General Longstreet asks General Pickett "George, can you take that ridge?" and Pickett's face dissolves into a big goofy grin I think to myself "Oh, come on. Let him do it! Just this one time! Just for the hell of it!" You see, my best friends in the Marines were all Southerners, and some of the best people I've ever known.
I'm getting spaced-out by all this.
Let me pop another Faulkner quote on everyone, one of my favorites...
"Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs! Snobs are too busy being snobs to get in anyone else's business."
And the absolute best of them all (abridged)...
"In every fourteen-year-old Southern boy's mind it's not quite 2 o'clock on July third, 1963. It hasn't happened yet..."
Referring to Pickett's Charge, of course.
I have to confess, every time I watch the movie "Gettysburg," and General Longstreet asks General Pickett "George, can you take that ridge?" and Pickett's face dissolves into a big goofy grin I think to myself "Oh, come on. Let him do it! Just this one time! Just for the hell of it!"
You see, my best friends in the Marines were all Southerners, and some of the best people I've ever known.
I am not so sure that Major General Pickett was as gung ho as was presented. It is some time since I have read any detailed history of the Army of Northern Virginia. I do know that after the hidden battery opened up on the left of the men under General Pickett (some were from at least one other division) he was angry with General Lee for "destroying his division."
Johnny
Overmod--- So when your granddaughter 235 generations from now arrives and picks you up to take you trackside to see that Niagara and wave at the engineer don't be to surprised if I'm already there waiting for you because I asked her to fetch you!
I promise not to say "told ya so".
"In every fourteen-year-old Southern boy's mind it's not quite 2 o'clock on July third, 1863. It hasn't happened yet..."
Dr. Brian Cox would disagree with you.
Brian Cox (Picture: BBC) Brian Cox’s new BBC series Forces Of Nature has been attempting to explain exactly how the beauty of planet Earth is created by just a few simple forces – and he may have just succeeded with one simple sentence. Monday’s episode saw the Professor try to explain how and why we can’t feel the speed at which our universe moves. And at the end, Brian reached the gorgeous and astonishing conclusion that, thanks to space-time, all of our pasts and our presents and our futures exist – right now: ‘If you take Einstein’s universe at face value – and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, it’s our best theory of space and time – then this picture of space-time, with events placed within it, suggests something wonderful, and I think quite magical. ‘If I leave a place in space, then it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it, and in space-time, if I leave an event it doesn’t cease to exist when I’ve left it. ‘So, that suggests that all those summers you spent with your mum and dad, or that first Christmas with your grandparents long ago, all those most precious memories of people and places, all those summers and winters past, and seasons yet to come, are out there. ‘Somewhere in space-time.’
Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2016/07/12/mondays-episode-of-brian-coxs-forces-of-nature-ended-on-the-most-heartwarming-note-6001457/?ito=cbshare
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/
https://metro.co.uk/2016/07/12/mondays-episode-of-brian-coxs-forces-of-nature-ended-on-the-most-heartwarming-note-6001457/
MiningmanThe past is out there. In Space-Time. It is along that spiral that the earth has traced out while revolving around the sun and moving forward in Space-Time that it exists still.
I hate to say this, I really do, but 'spacetime' isn't what you think it is. It's the thing that becomes required in relativistic mechanics where high speeds begin to create Lorenz-Fitzgerald effects and time dilation is observed in the moving frame relative to a 'slower' one. You no longer have absolute space, but its distortion and that of time are coordinated, which is why we can speak of a conflated metric in scientific terms. (A corollary is why we can't exceed lightspeed in Einsteinian spacetime, which is an interesting discussion, and why 'exceeding lightspeed' won't make the 'arrow of time' reverse deterministically.)
The problem I think you have is in thinking that 'time' is a fourth dimension equivalent to the three in Euclidean space (or distorted metrics). It is not the 'fourth dimension' that is nominally a higher dimension in, say, tesseracts or string theory. It's a mathematical convention, not a reality with its own independent characteristics.
Few things would make me happier than to think there are adjacent past and future 'realities' that are turns of a cosmic helix (note: 'spiral' is not the right word to use for what you mean) and could be accessed just by 'there's a hell of a universe next door; let's go' as cummings said. But there is no recursive 'thing' that is tied to periodic orbital position...
I'm saddened to see you feel that way. I fully understand though.
Difficult to come up with a good analogy.
Say you are a medieval peasant farmer on his assigned strip of land with a plow and a pair of oxen. You toil and sweat for the Overlord, you are a keep, and only a very meager existence is left for you and your family. As you physically labour one day you stare into the sky and wonder if someday we can fly... you have no idea how, no education, no understanding of the things required at all but still through the fog of ignorance you think about it. You think it would have to be a device, a thing, like your plow. It makes no sense, you cannot grasp it. That's all quite remarkable actually. Soon enough you are back to toiling for the Overlord and the thought fades.
The past is out there. In Space-Time. It is along that spiral that the earth has traced out while revolving around the sun and moving forward in Space-Time that it exists still. It's not worlds within worlds or multi dimensional stuff. It is simply what was at a specific point in Space-Time. I don't know much more than that. I believe we will find a way to access it. Whether we can interact or not or just observe is unknown. It short circuits my head to imagine and that is maybe where Quantum Physics takes over. It is also a remarkable thought though.
Miningman... we can go to those locations. They don't cease to exist just because you left.
But to counterquote, from an equally famous Southern author, Thomas Wolfe, 'you can't go home again'. And it's the 'home', not the 'place', that made the experience for which we're nostalgic.
Just because we cannot go back in time doesn't mean the past isn't out there. It doesn't cease to exist either just because we left.
Tell that to me as I stand on the CASO ROW, or look around some of the locations I remember you repeatedly bewailing the absence of any recognizable railroad presence in. Tell that to me when I want to ask someone on the Niagara how to run the lubricator effectively if sliding-pressure firing it to reduce fuel consumption, or talk to the guys in a Mike Bednar video I see waving from the cab.
The past only exists to the extent we remember it, or can be reminded of it through something that our senses can still detect. All the other wonder and complexity is gone almost certainly without trace; to the extent the many-worlds hypotheses may be true, it still becomes truly impossible to choose one particular stretch of past time in this reality separate from any of the myriads of alternate ones.
This is particularly hard for those of us who were not there to experience things firsthand ... sometimes by mere accident of birth or circumstance, perhaps by only a very short time. All we have are the pictures and stories, and the edge of history is constantly sweeping the storytellers away together with all their untold stories. That is why we should treasure what we have, while we can, and not rationalize we might have more in this world. (We will certainly have different concerns, if indeed any concerns, about enjoying past railroading once out of it!)
Wow. Reminds me of William Faulkner talking about the American South, or at least his particular part of it...
"The past isn't dead. It's not even past."
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