Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.
Time is the experience of change. Such changes are from ephemeral to enduring. Continual changes have the characteristics of sequence. The sequence may reverse but from the viewpoint of experience the direction of change is always “forward”. Real time always refers to changes in physical extensions. Therefore, in the absence of matter and field there are no extensions and no time.
Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.
Time has always been measured relative to changes in material aspects, whether in religion, philosophy, or science.
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe—a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of “container” that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.
Newtonian time is measured objectively with respect to changes in matter. But Leibniz and Kant view time subjectively as an abstraction.
Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as “what a clock reads”. See Units of Time. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities. Time is used to define other quantities—such as velocity—so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy.
The clock time is Newtonian time because a clock is made up of matter. When we consider field that underlies matter, the changes in the extension of the field appear as time, such that the extension and its change maintain a constant ratio ‘c’. In other words, the extensions of the field can change only at a certain rate determined by ‘c’. In abstract terms, neither space nor time can be considered independently of each other, as they occur in a fixed relationship.
Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value (“time is money”) as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.
The objectivity of time has improved with the discovery of the field. The subjectivity of time is felt very strongly as always.
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.
The above is an incomplete definition of space. This word “boundless” makes it a mathematical abstraction. Real space always describes the dimensional extent of something. If that something is not identified, then you do not have a complete description of space.
Our sense of space comes from the dimension of material objects. We assume space to be as rigid as these objects, but that doesn’t seem to go with reality. The above paragraph seems to admit to this incompleteness of definition.
Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called khôra (i.e. “space”), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of topos (i.e. place), or in the later “geometrical conception of place” as “space qua extension” in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab polymath Alhazen. Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton’s view, space was absolute—in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the space. Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley attempted to refute the “visibility of spatial depth” in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Later, the metaphysician Immanuel Kant said that the concepts of space and time are not empirical ones derived from experiences of the outside world—they are elements of an already given systematic framework that humans possess and use to structure all experiences. Kant referred to the experience of “space” in his Critique of Pure Reason as being a subjective “pure a priori form of intuition”.
The reason the complete definition of space could not be discovered until now is because of the hidden reality of FIELD. The existence of field was not known until it was discovered through extensive experimental observations made of the electromagnetic phenomena by Faraday. The space out there represents the dimensions of field. Field is the fundamental substance that fills the emptiness.
In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine geometries that are non-Euclidean, in which space is conceived as curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space. Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean geometries provide a better model for the shape of space.
The conceptualization of space has mostly been philosophical and mathematical. Assumptions about space have been slowly discovered over time as in non-Euclidian geometry and general relativity. Now it will take a study of field to get a better understanding of space.
The characteristic of the field is “continual change”, which manifests itself in the form of endless CYCLES. Each cycle is an oscillation between electric and magnetic states. This oscillation is the source of quantization of ENERGY. Energy is the active substance that appears in all interactions and builds all phenomena including matter.
Field consists of cycles of ENERGY.
Each cycle has the same amount of energy. A cycle thus represents the ultimate unit of energy. The quantitative value of this unit is the Planck’s constant ‘h’, which is a universal constant.
A CYCLE represents a unit of energy.
The rate of recurrence of cycles is called FREQUENCY. As frequency increases, there are more cycles in a measured interval. So the density of cycles increases with frequency. Energy becomes more focused and substantial with increase in frequency. This can be shown by the relationship
E = hf,
where E is energy, f is frequency, and h is the Planck’s constant.
Energy builds up with cycles. These cycles organize themselves in different phenomena. Energy can be converted from one type of phenomenon to another. Such a conversion seems to conserve the cycles of energy. Thus comes about the law of Conservation of Energy.
Energy appears to conserve itself as the total number of cycles in the universe.
In physics, a field is a physical quantity, represented by a number or tensor, that has a value for each point in space and time. For example, on a weather map, the surface wind velocity is described by assigning a vector to each point on a map. Each vector represents the speed and direction of the movement of air at that point. As another example, an electric field can be thought of as a “condition in space” emanating from an electric charge and extending throughout the whole of space. When a test electric charge is placed in this electric field, the particle accelerates due to a force. Physicists have found the notion of a field to be of such practical utility for the analysis of forces that they have come to think of a force as due to a field. The sloppy use of language to which physicists are prone may lead to confusion in the student as to whether field here means “region” or “single point force vector” within a given region or “a set of point force vectors” within a given region or “all point force vectors” within a given region (bear in mind the fact that Gravitational and Electromagnetic Forces have ranges that are theoretically infinite).
The concept of field started out as a mathematical device to describe fluid flows at every point in space, such as on a weather map. Later it was used to describe electric and magnetic fields by their lines of forces at every point in space. Now it is being used to describe force vectors due to gravitation at every point of a theoretically infinite space.
It is only recently that the electromagnetic field has come to be looked upon as a basic substance on its own right that has dimensions. An example of such a field is light. The concept of substance as an electromagnetic field is yet to be sorted out fully. As a physical substance, this field has extensions and varying degrees of solidity. We may now divide substance into “matter” and “field”.
In the modern framework of the quantum theory of fields, even without referring to a test particle, a field occupies space, contains energy, and its presence precludes a classical “true vacuum”. This led physicists to consider electromagnetic fields to be a physical entity, making the field concept a supporting paradigm of the edifice of modern physics. “The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real … a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have.” In practice, the strength of most fields has been found to diminish with distance to the point of being undetectable. For instance the strength of many relevant classical fields, such as the gravitational field in Newton’s theory of gravity or the electrostatic field in classical electromagnetism, is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source (i.e., they follow Gauss’s law). One consequence is that the Earth’s gravitational field quickly becomes undetectable on cosmic scales.
This brings a revolution to the concept of “space”. Space has always been conceived in the context of physical extensions. We have been measuring space as if it were rigid like matter. Now we can conceive of space differently as the extensions of the invisible “field”. A “true vacuum” may be free of substance as “matter”, but it may not be free of substance as “field”. We notice that as we see light travel through the intergalactic space. What we think of “empty space” may just be the invisible “field”. This would explain dark matter and dark energy quite nicely.
We may now explain space itself as the extensions of the field. We come to see space as a property of substance rather than as the absence of substance. We no longer see space existing in the absence of substance. It now seems absurd to talk about “matter occupying space” or “field being a condition in space”. The context of “space” is replaced by the concept of emptiness. Space is the property of extension of field that exists in emptiness. We can experience space because we can experience substance. That is how substance is defined. But we cannot experience emptiness, which is an absence of substance.
An electric field is, therefore, a condition in emptiness and not a “condition in space”. This shift in viewpoint makes “energy” of field comparable to “mass” of matter. The electric charge can now be viewed as a condensed region within the electric field and not merely a mathematical entity of a “single point force vector”. The density of the field may be defined in terms of the compactness of cycles due to higher frequencies.
Force is expressed as a gradient of momentum. In case of the field, this momentum is proportional to frequency. Therefore, force exists in a field as a gradient of frequency. Thus, forces arise due to gradients in frequency around the condensed regions of the field. “Strength” of the field diminishes as frequency gradients diminish in the field.
A field can be classified as a scalar field, a vector field, a spinor field or a tensor field according to whether the represented physical quantity is a scalar, a vector, a spinor, or a tensor, respectively. A field has a unique tensorial character in every point where it is defined: i.e. a field cannot be a scalar field somewhere and a vector field somewhere else. For example, the Newtonian gravitational field is a vector field: specifying its value at a point in spacetime requires three numbers, the components of the gravitational field vector at that point. Moreover, within each category (scalar, vector, tensor), a field can be either a classical field or a quantum field, depending on whether it is characterized by numbers or quantum operators respectively. In fact in this theory an equivalent representation of field is a field particle, namely a boson.
The classification of fields as scalar, vector, spinor, or tensor is mathematical. In reality, the primary field is electromagnetic. The secondary field is gravitational, which is made of frequency gradients.
An electromagnetic field is much more than either electric or magnetic field. An electromagnetic field consists of dynamic cycles in which electric and magnetic energies are rapidly interchanging just like kinetic and potential energies interchange during the oscillations of a pendulum. Thus we may compare electric to kinetic energy, and magnetic to potential energy. Each cycle of the electromagnetic field is composed of energy equal to the Planck’s constant ‘h’. The properties of these cycles change as they get compressed with increasing frequency. This is observed in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The cycles in the gamma region start to become so compacted that they start to display the property of mass. This part of spectrum is displayed in the structure of the atom in which the gradient of frequency (or density) rapidly increases towards the center. Quantum particles appear in rapidly condensing field like eddies appear in a rapidly moving flow. All quantum particles are manifestations of the condensed regions of the electromagnetic field in the gamma range of frequencies. The fundamental quantization occurs in terms of the energy of cycle and its frequency.
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History
To Isaac Newton his law of universal gravitation simply expressed the gravitational force that acted between any pair of massive objects. When looking at the motion of many bodies all interacting with each other, such as the planets in the Solar System, dealing with the force between each pair of bodies separately rapidly becomes computationally inconvenient. In the eighteenth century, a new quantity was devised to simplify the bookkeeping of all these gravitational forces. This quantity, the gravitational field, gave at each point in space the total gravitational force which would be felt by an object with unit mass at that point. This did not change the physics in any way: it did not matter if all the gravitational forces on an object were calculated individually and then added together, or if all the contributions were first added together as a gravitational field and then applied to an object.
The gravitational force is more accurately defined in the context of a field. It is more than just a mathematical convenience. The gravitational force is the cumulative effect of all the gradients of field density between any two bodies.
The development of the independent concept of a field truly began in the nineteenth century with the development of the theory of electromagnetism. In the early stages, André-Marie Ampère and Charles-Augustin de Coulomb could manage with Newton-style laws that expressed the forces between pairs of electric charges or electric currents. However, it became much more natural to take the field approach and express these laws in terms of electric and magnetic fields; in 1849 Michael Faraday became the first to coin the term “field”.
The independent nature of the field became more apparent with James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery that waves in these fields propagated at a finite speed. Consequently, the forces on charges and currents no longer just depended on the positions and velocities of other charges and currents at the same time, but also on their positions and velocities in the past.
The field is naturally bound by emptiness, whose frequency is zero. The field, therefore, develops from a frequency of zero to higher frequencies in a continuous fashion. The first quantization occurs in terms of the cycles of frequency.
The field acquires different properties throughout its frequency range in the electromagnetic spectrum. The electrical properties are part of it. The forces depend on three dimensional frequency gradients rather than on linear distances. Waves in the field propagate at a finite speed because field has inertia. This inertia occurs in the form of permittivity and permeability. This inertia produces the finite characteristic of the velocity of light ‘c’.
Maxwell, at first, did not adopt the modern concept of a field as a fundamental quantity that could independently exist. Instead, he supposed that the electromagnetic field expressed the deformation of some underlying medium—the luminiferous aether—much like the tension in a rubber membrane. If that were the case, the observed velocity of the electromagnetic waves should depend upon the velocity of the observer with respect to the aether. Despite much effort, no experimental evidence of such an effect was ever found; the situation was resolved by the introduction of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905. This theory changed the way the viewpoints of moving observers should be related to each other in such a way that velocity of electromagnetic waves in Maxwell’s theory would be the same for all observers. By doing away with the need for a background medium, this development opened the way for physicists to start thinking about fields as truly independent entities.
An electromagnetic wave is a disturbance in the electromagnetic field in the form of a ripple. There is no other substance. Underlying this field is “emptiness”, which is complete absence of substance. At lower frequencies the field comes very close to being “no substance” with its inertia reduced to zero and its wavelength and duration expanded to infinite.
The “velocity” of light is not infinite because field has inertia. As the density of the field increases with frequency, the magnitude of this “velocity” decreases. The velocity of the quantum particles in the gamma region is a fraction of ‘c’. This velocity may be plotted against inertia of the field. This velocity approaches infinity as inertia approaches zero. This velocity is independent of the observer (the frame of reference) of the theory of relativity. The theory of relativity does not take inertia into account. It works only in those cases where the differences in inertia are extremely large, such as, between light and planetary body. The Michelson-Morley’s experiment failed only because it lacked the accuracy to compare the inertia of light to the inertia of earth.
Einstein assumed the inertia of light to be zero, but if that were the case, the velocity of light would be infinite. This inconsistency underlies the theory of relativity. We are dealing here with a range of inertia that is mind boggling.
In the late 1920s, the new rules of quantum mechanics were first applied to the electromagnetic fields. In 1927, Paul Dirac used quantum fields to successfully explain how the decay of an atom to a lower quantum state lead to the spontaneous emission of a photon, the quantum of the electromagnetic field. This was soon followed by the realization (following the work of Pascual Jordan, Eugene Wigner, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli) that all particles, including electrons and protons, could be understood as the quanta of some quantum field, elevating fields to the status of the most fundamental objects in nature. That said, John Wheeler and Richard Feynman seriously considered Newton’s pre-field concept of action at a distance (although they set it aside because of the ongoing utility of the field concept for research in general relativity and quantum electrodynamics).
In atomic interactions, energy always changes in terms a certain number of frequency cycles. Therefore, such change appears to be quantized. Quanta relates to a packet of energy involved in an energy interaction among fields. All quantum particles consist of quanta.
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Further Comments
These are the comments inspired by the rest of Wikipedia article.
Classical fields are mathematical only. They represent vector force, an idea based on the mass property of matter. The gravitational and electric fields have been looked upon as emanating from matter.
Newtonian gravitation
According to Disturbance theory mass is a very condensed region of the field in the upper gamma range. There is no emptiness between two bodies. There is only a continuation of much less dense field between them.
The distance between the two bodies is the sum of all the wavelengths of the field cycles between them. These cycles are not rigid like matter. They can also vary in their wavelengths and frequency.
The attractive force of gravitation between two bodies is the summation of all frequency gradients between them. The highest frequency gradient exists at the surface of the bodies. Newton’s law of gravitation provides an approximation of this force.
A mass particle moves as a high inertia ripple in a very low inertia field. Its natural velocity is based on the interaction of its inertia with the surrounding inertia. Inertia depends on the density of the field.
Electromagnetism
A charge particle is a condensed region of the field in lower gamma range. Its frequency gradient is also steep but less condensed compared to the gradient in the upper gamma range. Therefore, the two ends of the gradient appear to be separated as negative and positive.
The relationship between electric and magnetic energy is similar to the relationship between kinetic and potential energy.
Gravitation in general relativity
In general relativity, mass-energy warps space time. Per Disturbance theory it is the other way around. Fundamental reality is the electromagnetic field, which condenses into energy-mass. The condensation creates frequency gradients that act as force. The nature of this force differs depending on its position on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Waves as fields
Waves are part of the electromagnetic field in which they move as a three-dimensional ripple. They have finite propagation speed because of inertia intrinsic to the field. Their 3D nature results in the inverse-square law.
Quantum fields
All physical phenomena start with electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field consists of cycles, and, therefore, it is quantized. Only when it condenses into mass that it is no longer quantized. All that changes from classical to quantum is the mathematics.
Field theory
Field theory deals with the dynamic aspects of the field.
