Reddit reviews A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein

https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Time-Forgotten-Einstein/dp/0465092942

> Everything we know about obey the rules of time

So we're talking here about human knowledge reflecting something that seems natural to humans -- not very surprising I'd say. More generally, I think that all of our perceptions of the world are strictly limited by our sense perceptions. Atoms aren't really the way they appear to us, any more than daisies are really white. Daisies look white because of the way our eyes work, and atoms have the properties they do because those are the properties perceptible to us via the tools and theories we've developed to understand atoms. We can't possibly know what they "really" are like.

> You also have oversimplified the theory of relativity

No doubt! I just started reading this book but it caught my eye cos I was thinking about time already.

>Did you read the Rebecca Goldstein biography of Godel? That's the one I remember reading, and I also thought he stopped eating because of paranoia. He thought everyone was trying to poison him, while he worked on the ontological proof for the existence of God.


No, I read a very short one. A World Without Time. It's been a while, and I think I still have it in a box somewhere. It's possible my memory failed or I read into a passage in the book and made more of it. But I'm certain the author wrote about Godel's low calorie diet. The author also did talk about his paranoia regarding food.

> "Edit: I want to add something to clarify where I'm coming from. I'm not trying to claim that we know for sure what happens at or inside an event horizon - work on that is still an active subject of research, and directly relevant empirical evidence to test theories against is very limited."

That's fair enough. But I think there's more that can be squeezed out of what we've got by reading the original material. As far as I can tell, nobody ever does.

> "However, there are well-known solutions to the Einstein field equations that can be unambiguously applied to these scenarios, and answers can be obtained from them. That's hard to dispute, since it's ultimately some pretty straightforward math (now that people like Schwarzschild have done the heavy lifting.) And these solutions provide answers to the questions you're asking".

Schwarzschild goes as far as the event horizon and blows up. Then people deem the r=rs event-horizon singularity to be a mere artefact that can be readily overcome. I say it can't.

> "It's certainly possible to object that at or inside an event horizon, the equations may not apply - that there's some boundary condition that we need to take into account, etc. But in order to do that plausibly, you have to provide an alternative hypothesis that can be verified with a mathematical solution, or else you're just effectively making an unsubstantiated claim".

This is what the frozen-star interpretation is. It isn't something I've invented. Besides, we already have the mathematical solution, it's just that most people won't accept what it says. Because they don't understand time. Because they've never read this. They have it drummed into them that a clock measures proper time. It doesn't. It "clocks up" some kind of regular cyclical local motion and displays a cumulative result that we call the time. When the light can't get out, there isn't any. Something else that never ceases to surprise me is that most people don't know that the upward photon doesn't lose any energy, or that it speeds up as it ascends.

> "What you've been doing seems to fall firmly into the "unsubstantiated claim" camp, at least so far. I'm pointing out that, given seemingly valid solutions to the field equations that give a result that's consistent with expectations, it's not reasonable to expect anyone else to accept an unsubstantiated claim to the contrary. Why should they?"

Because they understand gravity. Because they understand the wave nature of matter and why their pencil falls down. Because the speed of light up here is greater than the speed of light down there. Because a concentration of energy in the guise of a planet "conditions" the surrounding space, altering its properties, this effect diminishing with distance.

> "If your answer to this is that your solution arises out of appropriate application of existing theory, then as mentioned above, that's easily settled - let's see the math".

I don't have any new math. What we're talking about here is an interpretation that most people don't even know about.