KARL JASPERS FORUM

Short Note 40 (to N39 by Wood)

SPEED OF LIGHT
by Claude Rifat
17 July 2002, posted 27 August 2002

[1]
This response recognizes your efforts to keep the dialogue moving and in that light I'll provide some constancy in the form of several lines, even if it means dancing with you about the line on a pin's head -- until such time as we can go a tip-toeing back to the harvest field.

[2]
[Wood] If we assume light has a measured determined speed there must be a source if not immeasurable at least not yet measured, and there is some support from theoretical physics that light as such does not travel but is more than less simultaneous.

[Claude Rifat]

I have been wondering, these days, "who" is travelling, meaning is light really "travelling" or are we, physical "objects", travelling within a Reality of "light" ?

After some considerations, it occured to me that I am starting to agree with half of Vesselin Petkov's hypothesis about a "block Cosmos" !

It seems geometrically more logical to me to assume that we are "travelling" from the Present to the Past while "light" is,in fact, "immobile" in the "block Cosmos" à la Vesselin Petkov, a kind of Cosmos of immaterial "light" versus matter.

Time might be a change of phase, converting the Present into a crystallised, non-local, Past, something analogous to the change of phase between liquid, warm, water and crystallised, frozen, water.

In this view, the real Cosmos would be a crystallised 4 dimensional Structure ... and the Present would be the crystallisation process in the making. Therefore, our motion in time would mean that all our past I (selves) are being crystallised ... and that our feeling of time is a feeling of phase change.

Interestingly, this brings back to me what I have discovered about the way our memory stores perceptions into a continuum, such as the continuum of I, of selves.

Might it be possible to bridge this discovery of a biologist with the discoveries of physicists???

I explain myself: biologists do not care much about time as we assume that time is not a real dimension. Therefore, we equally assume that all our memories are stored IN our brains and that the past is really past, meaning it does not exist anymore anywhere.

However, if we assume like physicists seem to do, that time is a real "dimension" and not something imaginary, it would follow that the continuum of I would, in fact, be stored, continuously, into the Past resulting from a continuous process of conversion of Present into Past.

That is a very strange idea for a biologist because it implies that time, contrary to be something just imaginary, would, indeed, be a block with Space, as proposed by Einstein and I have to say that biologists do not enjoy this kind of block Cosmos ... :-(

If I understand Vesselin Petkov, time would seem to be the "data classification" process of the Cosmos which, in turn, implies that the Past would coexist with the Present and would consist of a frozen "crystallised" structure being a continuum of all the slices of the Present which was converted into the Past.

This brings to my mind the above mentioned observation that, in our memory, we exist as a continuum of I and NOT as a unique I. The real Claude or the real Vesselin, in their respective memories, are made of slices of Present all stored together into a structure of which the fundamental law is patterns of homologous variation.

Travelling within my memory does not really require time because time is frozen as all the previous Claude coexist simultaneously. In endoreality, time is a mere coordinate.

Therefore, the question that I just ask myself, right now, is this one: Does the continuum which is stored in our memory (the biologist point of view) is really stored IN? Could my Past exist, in fact, in this block Cosmos of Vesselin Petkov instead of my own memory ???

This would mean that my Past would not really be stored IN my brain but in the non-local continuum into a sort of quantic "hologram" (the Vacuum, synonymous, here, with the Past). Rather mind-boggling for a biologist!

The implications of such heuristic speculations are enormous. For example, death might be, in this respect, the mere passage of our consciousness into the block, crystallised, Cosmos, into the .... "Vacuum-Past".

By dying, we would simply become aware of all our previous I stored into this bizarre Cosmos which would look more like a Cosmos of classified archives, a data bank, than the Universe as we presently conceive it.

Exploring these ideas in details seem important because such a hypothetical Cosmos would bring meaning back into our daily lives, as opposed to reality as seen by biologists.

We, biologists, have discovered a lot about the process of life but the more we discovered and the more we found that there was no meaning at all in all that.

Perhaps the physicists might bring back the meaning we have erased from reality?

--------------------------------

Claude Rifat (deceased)

[Claude Rifat's wife might be interested in receiving correspondence]