RE: ID at NRO

 Tuesday, February 15, 2005

I liked what Moorad said. It reminded me of a quotation in a book I
recently read:

"If you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New year's
Eve, 1999, you still are, since that is just one immutable location in
spacetime." Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2004), p. 139

Here's to Y2K!

> There is a feature of the Minkowski 4-dimensional spacetime
> that is queer, which is a feature of special relativity. When
> using such diagrams to describe the world curve of anything
> that exists, one must drawn a complete curve, from beginning
> to end. Therefore, the whole history of that particular
> entity is known, so to speak, from birth to death. One is so
> used to time proceeding moment by moment and viewing
> spacetime in the Minkowski way seems to put us in the
> position of God, where the whole of time is an eternal now.
> Of course, if we think of God as sustaining the creation,
> then He may be creating all that there is instant by instant.
> In physics we deal with events as points in spacetime, I am
> not sure how to visualize humans embedded in a Minkowski spacetime.
>
> Moorad
>
Received on Tue Feb 15 20:43:49 2005