Physics of space-time, introduction and summary

Intro.1. The map and the area

An important task for physics is to map the area. This map, like every map, is abstract and mathematical. Maps are very useful. However, the map is not the area.
On the map one can picture static things and their forms, but not the dynamical relations that play between the things. Relations play in the emptiness, are no things. Relations also are invisible, only the partners are visible, or the impressions of relations. These relations can only be experienced in the real area.

Compare it with music. Even the most beautiful melody can be described as only a number of figures, figures for the frequency of tones, the duration of tones and pauses, the loudness or amplitude of the waves and the like. Input of these figures in a computer can recreate the music completely. Is music only figures?
Understanding these figures does no involve understanding the music. And the other way around, a musical person does not need to know these figures. Music plays in the relations between the tones, like time plays between the measured points of time.
Understanding then is feeling, speechless feeling.

This essay is no mathematics. But it is no music either. It is about the interpretation of the map, the relation between map and area, which also is the relation between subject and object or mind and body.

I think the real problem of nowadays physics is not lain in a lack of knowledge of facts. We can build ever bigger particle accelerators and then measure ever more figures. But these figures alone will never reveal us the real secrets of reality, I believe.

According to me, these secrets are hidden in the relations between the measurable facts, which relations only can be felt. The field of light is such a relating phenomenon. Our act of measuring and even our act of understanding are such relational phenomena as well.

Intro.2. Summary

In the relational view at human and reality (see the Relational philosophy on this website) the immaterial relations appear to be really fundamentally important. Do we think away these in emptiness playing relations, then the things and parts in our reality lose all significance, even their size, mass and border.

The field of light is the ultimate relating phenomenon in nature. "In the beginning there was light" therefore is the title of chapter III.6 of the relational philosophy.
Physics of space-time goes into that electromagnetic phenomenon of light more deeply.

Part I is about distance. With distance we always mean space and time in one, space taking time. By seeing the difference between length and distance, we can shed a more clear light on for example both relativity theories. That is the subject of part I of physics of space-time.

Light, in particular the speed of light, is expressed in terms of space per time, meters per second. And since our finite light is the fundament of whole reality , physics must be able to describe reality in terms of only meters and seconds, and numbers or figures of course.
Standards like the gram and the coulomb then are superfluous, and that is the subject of part II of physics of space-time.

Reality then is geometry, mathematics, as far as the quantity is concerned.

Jan Helderman
end 1999 - beginning 2000