experiments show that interactions are not simultaneous, but rather that all influences propagate at the speed of light or slower.
I agree that interaction takes time, it happens at a speed. Everything what happens, happens at a speed and takes some time.
This notion alone does not negate the possibility that all existence might be simultaneous. Analogically, I can say kicking a football takes time, yet my foot and the ball exist simultaneously.
this seperation between past present and future is entirely local and according to the light cone. In other words, there is no now-everywhere, but only a here-now.
Is it a proven fact that there is no now-everywhere? See my points below, they are the reason why I assume that a now-everywhere should theoretically exist.
Many things are causally-disconnected, and it does not disturb the logic of the "chain reaction" if these events get reordered depending on the observer.
And that's exactly what relativity does. It allows that causally-disconnected, light-speed-separated events have ambiguous ordering.
My logical obstacle to accepting this thought lies here:
- Local events are subject to causal interaction, and have a strict chronological order. We can write a timeline of local events, second by second what happened at 15:40:45, and what happened a second later, and so on.
- Remote events interact via light rays, among other things. Assume that beings on two planets very remote from each other observe each other with a powerful telescope. These two planets are outside of the lightcones of each other, you would say: they are not part of the same "local here".
On both of the planets X and Y, an observer has a webcam looking out of his window towards a randomly erupting volcano, and another webcam looking at the other planet through a telescope. Both webcams (on both planets, which makes total 4 webcams) record what they see 24/7, and label each frame with a timestamp, and store the data permanently on a hard disk. Thus we have a well documented local timeline on both planets, and well documented observations what was seen happening on the other planet at the same moment. (These seen events happened some time earlier than they are seen, of course.)
By comparing the timestamped recordings of the four webcams, we can prove a lot about the chronological order of events. When we witness a remote event, it is proof of chronological order: what we see certainly happened before we see it. There can be no relative ambiguity about that.
Actually we should be able to synchronize the timelines of all four webcams with the precision of 1/24 fraction of a second, by comparing the timestamps of several volcanic eruptions which are seen in the local and remote webcams of the two planets, and which overlap so that we can limit the chronological order in both directions, not only "all of this happened before all of that". Once we have established a synchronization between the timelines of planets X and Y, we have a universal timestamp (what comes to these two planets) which can be used to synchronize any other event whose timestamp is locally known.
) is that when one talks about the so-called arrow of time in a thermodynamic sense, the idea breaks down at the quantum level. If we think of the arrow of time as outlined by increases in entropy as usually described, and if we understand the real statistical nature of "heat flowing from hot to cold" and the increase of entropy in a closed system, when the system is a relatively small number of atoms/molecules (such as in quantum scenarios) then it is not uncommon to see "violations" of the laws of thermodynamics.
), but it does have weird implications for the so-called arrow of time concept.
