Neo. You referred to the flaw in both Newton's and Einstein's models for planetary motion and correctly identified its nature. Poincare knew it a lot better, as highlighted in his work on the three-body problem. It is absolutely a problem of physics per se, and not solely one of mathematics, because as Poincare revealed neither Newton's absolute time nor Minkwoski's co-ordinate time can model a moving object. They only model snapshots of a moving object.
I never said that chaos theory refutes the existence of space. I said that chaos theory has nothing to say about space. The physical existence of space has been adequately refuted by philosophy. Likewise psychology and neuroscience do not refute the existence of space because they have nothing to say about space in this physical sense. These sciences simply point out that spaces are a construct of our consciousness which are created by us to MAP our world. Interestingly last year's Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to a team who elaborated the neurological mechanism for this. That we map our world rather than directly observe it is a proposition beyond dispute which predates Plato. Having this confirmed by 21st century science is helpful but quite unnecessary since it is bloody obvious.
I use the term non-linear determinism in exactly the same sense as everybody else does. Whether you choose to call it chaos theory, cybernetics, complexity theory, evolution, systems theory, or some other analogous term is your own affair. Linear determinism is goal-directed and non-linear-determinism is not. Non-linear determinism can only be modelled fractally and the the fact that fractals have caught the imagination of the fruitloops is not my fault and not my concern.
You're quite right about Kant but Kant is not god. He does define his noumenon as unknowable for the very reason that I gave above. Only phenomena are directly accessible to our consciousness. Plato said the same thing with his Ideals and Forms. However Kant was a Newtonian who knew nothing of non-linear causation and the notion of emergence in the sense that these things are understood today. What I'm suggesting in this paradigm is that phenomena are that which we observe, and thus epistemological, and these can be modelled using linear determinism and Newtonian classical mathematics. However the underpinning ontology for these phenomena is that which Kant defined as unknowable and this is what I dispute. Specifically what I'm saying is that our epistemic models of physics have an underpinning ontology which is not linearly deterministic, as Newton thought and Einstein thought, but non-linearly deterministic as Poincare thought. By the way the three-body problem was finally solved with fractal geometry and now its principles have been extended to larger and more complex systems. Poincare had no hope of solving it, although he laid the foundations for its eventual solution with his topological theorems. Without Poincare it's quite possible that information theory could have taken much longer to evolve because Turing depended heavily on his work. It goes without saying that computation is another science which has no need of spaces. The three-body problem and its solution make no reference to space and yet it deals with cosmological objects. How do you reckon that could be if space is a physical property of the universe?
Regrettably the rest of your lengthy post is wanting in content. Simply saying what I refute by refuting what I say does not constitute an argument and thus much of it is unworthy of a response. However you do pre-empt much of my model when you ridicule me on the the notion of a chaotic computer, which is a perfectly precise definition of my model. Your ridicule is of no concern to me but is unbecoming in light of your scant understanding of non-linear systems theory .
I think this will work a lot better if you isolate particular aspects of my paradigm for clarification rather than try and sweep across the whole thing in one go. I'm trying to be methodical and I've really only just begun. All I've done so far is lay down the basic metaphysical framework for the model so please don't try and skip to the ending. Physics doesn't have a metaphysical framework but this model is unusable without it so I regarded this as an important first step.
Moving right along. I feel that I've adequately explained the apparent expansion of the universe in my responses to Greta and Vijay but I'm happy to elaborate if you don't get it. I'll now move on to what is regarded as the definitive proof of GR, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. If you can punch a hole in this I'll eat my keyboard.
Bear in mind that what I'm offering here is an explanatory framework for observed phenomena, not new physics. What I say refutes nothing that physics says but merely offers a vastly simpler way to think it through. We start with an axiomatic assumption which physics denies.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME IS PHYSICALLY REAL. Time really and truly does pass. This offers us the simplest imaginable definition of time and one which was given to us by the greatest time-denier of then all, Albert Einstein.
Time is what clocks measure Specifically clocks measure the speed at which time passes, a speed which is entirely determined by gravity and which obtains all the way down to the quantum level. A clock on my desk will tick more quickly than a clock on the floor. A clock on the carpet will tick more quickly than a clock on the bare floorboards beside it. A clock on the electron will tick more quickly than a clock on its host nucleus. This is quantum gravity but the precise details must come later. For the present this is all we need to understand. Every physical entity exists solely in its own temporal referential frame. Nothing controversial said thus far I trust since this is doctrinal physics.
We now turn to the most misunderstood concept in physics, the constant speed of light. In fact physics has never claimed that the speed of light is a constant. It merely claims that it is
observed to be a constant in the referential frame of the observer, a non-trivial distinction with profound implications. Measure the speed of light anywhere in the universe and you'll get a value of 300 million m/sec, AS MEASURED LOCALLY. This means that the speed of light is the most inconstant speed in the universe because time is interwoven with gravity all the way down to the quantum level. No two clocks in the universe can be synchronised. If v=d/t, and t is a movable feast, then v cannot be a constant, a mathematical truth which a child could understand. I'm well aware that physics circumvents this problem with the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction theorem but my model is ruthless with Occam's razor. The Lorentz transformation is forcing reality to conform with observation by brute mathematical force and is therefore unscientific. Its implications are demonstrably absurd although its predictive authority is unquestionable. In other words it is epistemically sound and ontologically nonsensical, like most of physics.
We should all recall the bent stick in the water experiment from high school science as a demonstration of the refractive properties of light. Since light travels more slowly in water than it does in air the observer observes the stick in the water bending. Lo and behold he takes the stick out of the water and it's perfectly straight. The effect is illusory because of the differential speed of light in the two different media.
In a spaceless universe all motion is in the time dimension only which makes gravitational lensing a precisely analogous phenomenon. The light from a distant quasar travels through time to the observer but it doesn't travel at a constant speed. The speed of light is determined by the speed at which time passes because light cannot travel faster than time. The speed at which time passes is determined by gravity and this is the first of the major unifications in my paradigm. Einstein unified time and gravity in GR but this model unifies both of them with the speed of light.
The speed of light and the speed at which time passes are one and the same thing. Obviously the same conclusion can be drawn from the thought experiment I put to Greta but in the case of gravitational lensing this conclusion offers us a perfectly natural explanation for the
apparent bending of light. Since the light from the quasar travels through time to the observer the presence of an intervening galaxy will slow it down. Time passes more slowly within galaxies than it does between them and light cannot travel faster than time. It is this slowing down of the light which the observer observes as bent light, just as it is the slowing down of the light that causes the apparent bending of the stick in water.
This explanation contradicts no laws of physics but it's a vastly simpler way of interpreting a phenomenon. Physics says that the light bends because it follows the trajectory of a curved space. A curved space is a mathematical object and not a physical one and therefore this explanation for gravitational lensing is non-mechanical. Even in principle it is utterly impossible to explain how empty space can achieve this remarkable feat without any physical properties. Einstein therefore had no qualms about defining GR as an action at a distance paradigm, as Newton's was, and then added this important qualifier when he published his paper.
"Spacetime should never be regarded as physically real"....Albert Einstein (1915)
I've promised a universe which a child could understand, Neo, and I'm delivering on my promise. What is wrong with this explanation? it is both logical and physical and contradicts no physical law. It honours the universal principle of Occam economy and needs no additional parameters to be fed into it from observation. On the grounds of logic alone it is sufficient to refute the ontological conclusions of the spacetime paradigm and yet it leaves its epistemic authority untouched. The explanation offered by physics can be repaired with the addition of two tiny little words so this is a little housekeeping. Light does not bend around an intervening galaxy because it follows the curvature of space. This is what light does.
Light
appears to bend around an intervening galaxy AS IF it follows the curvature of space. All it actually does is slow down. I can also show that the other canonical doctrines of physics are "as if" models and assert that the reason why this is so is because space does not physically exist, a statement which I intend to be taken literally.
Regards Leo
-- Updated January 6th, 2015, 12:15 pm to add the following --
Obvious Leo wrote:The physical existence of space has been adequately refuted by philosophy.
I should have added this. It was also adequately refuted by Michelson and Morley.