the Physics of Natural Time - a process not a location
An Outline of a new Discipline...

(ed. - some day merge this with my 2008 list of 'Principles of Natural Systems')  3/3/08

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Foreword:     

This is an early quick rough draft to begin providing something useful in this area....
5/13/00  7/8/00  1/29/01  6/19/05

 The outline that follows provides an overview of a research method for understanding the dynamics of physical 'happening'.  It's a for structures having independent parts, and a grand unified theory of change.  There are five fundamental ideas that form the basis of making this a new discipline of physics, Natural systems.

1. accumulation of change -  natural time, as a process rather than a location
2. local organization - independent evolution of local universes of relationships, the new inside structures and relational dimensions of evolving systems.
3. outside perspective - the measurable features and interactions between local structures providing the basis for mathematical models
4. inside perspecitve - completing the mathematical metaphore of nature with the addition of empirical tools that let you look look inside the local workings of things.
5. rate of change continuity - the methodological link between 3 & 4, a property of organizational change similar to derivative continuity that makes inside structure partly observable

Well, that may be a lot to absorbe in one step.   Applying the techniques, though, allows a mutually informative 'two world' view, looking at things from both inside and out, seeing where they meet, in a sense doubling the meaning of physics.  Physics presently prently provides a vision of nature as if structured from the point of view of an observer, i.e. as if observations were the mechanisms of nature.   Not only QM, which makes this claim explicitly, but all of physics.   All of physics derives its formulas from measures, there bye treating nature as a set of relationships between measures.   The simple truth that there is no observable physical process of measure, other than by hunman action, nor any mode of mathematical action to account for that portral of nature, is simply ignored.   Physics works so very well, why bother with the 'little' discrepancies in its model.   The physics of natural systems is fully compatible, however, conflicting only with the current mind set for interpreting scientific results.

Much has been achieved.   There would be much more to achieve if it were combined with  models developed from a point of view of the observed.    It's not at all impossible.   Our traditional outside perspective has provided a view of events as being controlled by outside conditions.   An inside perspective results in the appearance that organization develops from within, and it's fairly easily confirm.    If you look at the variety of events represented in time traces of change you can ask what events are happening locally without remote control.   Once you drop the idea that things might be following 'rules acting from afar' you find there's quite a lot.   Just define the locality in which anything occurs and that's where it developed.   Local happenings are often systematic and predictable in a simple way, like drips of water, or systematic in a complex way and more unpredictable like storms and great ecological, astronomical and even cultural events.   Organization develops in all of them however, and is clearly local.    With some care one can put together some of the pieces of how this happens.

One looks for the formation and decay of intertwined sets of relationships, creating inside and outside relationships with other things, as if separate universes of causation.   One can find plausible mechanisms for how this might occur in most cases, and there's generally no physical way for this kind of locally appearing order to be transferred from afar.   It may be difficult to understand, though, since an outside view of the insides of things can never be complete.    One particular reason is that natural systems and structures generally have many things being used by many things, simultaneously acting cross linked nodes, and we can only look at one thing at a time.   The preferred starting point for studying them (curriculum) is in-depth study of some single natural (accumulative) process of change from several scales of description, combined with maintaining careful distinction between what's real and what we build and record in our images.

The local appearance of 'new independent universes of  relationships' is  commonly observed in things displaying exponential-like rates of change.   These indicate the presence of a locally multiplying web of effects.    It doesn't tell you how they work, just where to look.    One can describe their boundaries and watch the phases of their independent localized development.   The inner workings of these strictly local happenings tend to follow a 'nucleation' sequence, the appearance of a small 'cell' of relationships around which others develop, and are generally to be found at the beginning and end of change of all kinds and scales.    What's remarkable is how astoundingly common these uncontrolled locally original creative events are,  particularly considering how common it is that people believe that everything in nature is predetermined and controlled.   They just don't come with ready keys to their independent internal workings (they're internalized after all), so what we don't see we think is not there.    How can such things possibly work, really?   Each level of organization just develops on what it finds useful, quite like the way it works in economics where taking things off the shelves puts even more things on the shelves.   In natural systems consumers create producers and vis-a-vis, and so you get growth and decay..

The most important, but perhaps the easiest, radical part of learning how to look inside these complex inner workings is to distinguish between natural and numeric time.   Natural time is the physical process of strictly accumulative change.   Numeric time is a sequence of numbers we use as accounting tokens to label observations and as a basis for equations.   The one is real and the other, however useful sometimes, is imaginary, and they really should have different names.    A little more on other aspects is available at The peculiar shapes and Inner Workings of Time.
 

 

Time Line Traces of whole events
To depict the cellular automata of local organizational mechanisms.

Traces with either a moving highlight or shadow bar to visually animate the dynamics at an adjustable speed.. Plan/section tomography animating the shape changes and working processes, perhaps size standardized w/ the scale displayed as one of the traces above.

to Sections...

5/13/00   The basic model of 'happening',  is based on a triad of natural relationships 1) the strict accumulation of change, natural time, 2) the local appearance of organization, independent evolving local worlds of relationships, insides,  and 3) outside perspective, the observable, interactions between local organizations.    With some techniques this allows the natural structures of 'happening' to be observable, though only indirectly knowable, as any independent universe remains exterior to our own relational point of view.     The preferred starting point for study (curriculum) is in depth study of some single natural (accumulative) process from several scales of description, combined with careful distinction between the study descriptions and the subject remaining undescribed.

The local appearance of new universes of inner dimensions (and deterministic relationships within and among them, isolated from those without) is  commonly observed,  from outside, as autonomous or semi-autonomous things, often displaying growth dynamics in exponential-like rates of change.    The inner workings of these strictly local happenings of new organization tend to follow some 'nucleation' sequence and are found in nature, rather amazingly,  at the beginning and end of finite periods of change of virtually all kinds on every scale.   They are the changes of state.       What's remarkable is how astoundingly common they are,  for us to be so impressively unaware of their presence.    Our vision is further obscured by generally seeing them as 'threads of dots', generally, as well as not seeing them from 'inside', and from having a lot of junk in our heads, rules that are more distractions than a useful guides.     The big difficulty is the strong natural barrier to understanding what's going on inside other things, that we just don't see them through their interior structures, but through our exterior relationships with them.     That is the given subject-object relationship.

Learning how to look inside the workings of 'other universes of dimensions'  (happening) requires distinguishing between time as an ever-present process of accumulation and time as a string of locations we use as an accounting scheme for our observations.  Remember, happening does not occur in our records and accounts of things, only in that world outside, beyond our imaginations.

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