The above image was originally posted on the forums in by Alta.
I loved it so much, I wanted to re-post it here, for two reasons:
First, so we have a backup in case the other version of the image goes offline, since the one Alta posted is actually externally hosted.
Second, thanks to the way 2D maps of the surface of non-flat near-spherical planets are a great analogy for Newtonian mappings of 4D spacetime, I wanted to thus highlight it's relevance to Feynman diagrams and to all of the following forum topics:
- In the same sense leftness is not real, time is not real.
- You can't be a physicalist if you believe in objective time or that there is an objective now
- Would Flat-Land Four-Eyed Freddy Notice a Difference?
- Neither time, time-ness, unconscious here-ness, unconscious now-ness, nor any unconscious presence exist.
- Your left is not the left. There is no "the left". Likewise, there is no "the past" or "the future". Time is not real.
- Time is not real. Correspondingly, nothing real is temporary.
- Without subjectivity (i.e. consciousness), there is no present. With subjectivity, there are infinite presents.
- Scientifically, the whole world you see is an obviously fake impossible world created by a brain in a dark quiet skull.
- There's no slice, chunk, or part of the universe that is 'now' versus not 'now' without you. There is no objective now.
- Objective leftness and rightness do not exist.
- There is no objective now. If there are subjective nows, there's infinite ones equally existing across all of spacetime.
- The beauty and peace of spatiotemporal presence itself will be with you, always, anywhere.
Not only does the 2D map reveal how easy it is to mix-up (1) what's true with a reference frame (e.g. one of infinitely equally valid contradicting mappings of the same objective reality) as being something that is (2) objectively true in a physical and/or non-fictional sense.
For instance, even a Flat Earther would notice that two people walking straight parallel lines on the surface of Earth would seem to be ultimately pushed together and get closer, in seeming violation of basic grade school geometry. The Flat Earther would need to believe in some imaginary force, which we could call a horizontal gravity, that accounts for how the two people walking in parallel lines end up getting closer to together despite no other (and no real) force acting on them. The Flat Earther would believe that horizontal gravity force really exists.
The USA and Australia are almost the same size, but on a traditional 2D map, the USA looks much bigger due to the length contraction or other length and size distortion that always must occur when mapping a curved 2D surface on a flat 2D surface. To partially fix their 2D map to account for that empirical provable observation, a Flat Earther would presumably need to cut out holes on their map. These would be black holes on their 2D that represent seemingly magical spaces where nothing exists, not even space itself, and thus where nothing can exist. This need for imaginary holes would become essentially absolute as the amount of length contraction (or expansion) approaches infinity.
You could even imagine a Flat Earther traveling around and around the globe in circles, but not considering themself to be going in circles but rather consider themself to be instead going in a straight line that is millions of times longer than the diameter of the spherical Earth. Their map would be infinite with the seven infinitely repeating on their map at ever-different different sizes, in a sort of infinite fractal pattern.
The Flat Earther might genuinely believe they live on an infinitely flat surface with infinite continents, and their map would get increasingly silly as they attempt to expand it while still making it match their empirical observations, while going round and round and round infinitely.
In the same way the flatness of Earth is an illusion, time is an illusion. In the same way a 2D map of the Earth's surface will always be very wrong; a model/mapping of the universe that uses time will always be wrong.
That doesn't mean it's not useful. Wrong can useful, especially to the degree the one using the wrongness is aware from the get-go of its intentional wrongness. That's essentially the meaning of the word estimation.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
- Each of these different maps can be seen as a different 'reference frame'. Consider the differences between any those those maps, such as that country might seem much larger on one than another, and which country is the largest country of all might be different. That is called 'length contraction'. Anything that can change between different mapping is called 'relative' because it does not correspond to anything real, since if it did that would mean each map is a map of an actual different world. Instead, the different maps each are inaccurate oversimplified representations of the same exact one world. The thing that is different between the maps is not a real thing or quality. Instead, it is a quality/attribute that only exists in the varying 2D representations of the 3D surface. No map is more valid than the other, and the which are different between them aren't actually real, meaning they don't represent real differences in the planets/reality/real world that the different conflicting maps represent (since they all represent the same one world).
With his theories of Special and General Relativity, Einstein proved that the difference between time and space itself is also relative, and that Newton's Flat Universe Model was and is as wrong as Flat Earth Theory, and any description of the universe that involves objective time or a singular objective present is wrong in the same way a 2D map is wrong, and likewise the ways in which any one mapping is wrong is relative to how that mapping is done.
We can learn a lot about the wrong way someone else will map the world by knowing which point they will incorrectly treat as the center. But really there is no center.
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- This is an example of what is called "length contraction" in Einstein's Theories of Special and General Relativity, demonstrated by analogy on a 2D map of the Earth's surface.
