Debunked

Not my area of expertise to comment on individually. I certainly didn't see any solid refutation of his argument though, only speculative.  And his mention of conceding that he might be wrong was followed up with a clause that you apparently overlooked.

As for his credentials,  when did Rietdijk or Putnam become physicists? When was the last time either of them were published in the Journal of Applied Physics?

I didn't overlook it. It's a distinctly weakening clause, a common practice for dealing with unknown variables does not constitute a concrete basis for judgement.

FWIW, I have a good deal of respect for your posts, Desednova and I don't much like having to pull you apart, here. Bryan is clearly a talented scientist, I read a lot of his blog, but the fact is he is arguing off record against a significant Philosophy of 20th century physics and I'm sure he knows that his blog does not constitute a solid unassailable refutation and I believe you probably should accept the same.

Wim Rietdijk is a physicist, his paper on this matter was first published in 1966 so you can imagine he is probably beyond the age of full time defending these days. He has a few recent works credited to his name, though.

Putnam holds a degree in Mathematics and in Philosophy and he has been long recognised and respected in the Philosophy of Science field so it is a bit of a stretch to argue against his credibility also.

Moreover, the same 4d existence concept is echoed by Roger Penrose in his Andromeda Paradox. If you don't know who Penrose is, he was one of Hawkings mentors (lecturing at Cambridge while Hawking was attending) and worked with Hawking when he formulated his cosmological singularity theorem (the one that lead to proof of the Big Bang, you might know of it), the general singularity theorems are the work of Hawking and Penrose combined and they are based on special relativity, in fact it is told that it was Penrose's unique understanding of special relativity that inspired Hawking to his theory of the cosmos. Penrose is primarily a mathematician, but hopefully knowing the significance of his role in modern physics might sway you from mistakenly thinking that Putnam could not have anything credible to contribute to Physics.

My apologies for a knee jerk reaction. I don't usually employ them due to the above tending to happen. Some research showed me that Rietdijk is indeed a theoretical physicist. Finding his writings are a little difficult,  and as his his name would imply, are mostly found in Dutch.

The argument made by the authors, and elaborated on by Penrose, seems similar to the 'time as a sliced loaf of bread' explanation that I've seen demonstrated. The problem with it is that it really has no effect on reality one way or another as it would require an observer to be able to view all events simultaneously.  Similar to Penrose's paradox, but on a universal scale. In other words, it can't be used to validate an omniscient god. It simply refers to what different observers might conclude as 'present observations' from their perspective. Being a non physicist, the only difference I can see in it and special relativity are semantics.

Yeah it's not the most appropriate title, really, I agree it seems somewhat misleading in that it might imply an infinity of points in time, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the intended implication of the reference to eternity. Rather, I think the reference is supposed to connote perpetuity rather than infinity - time is eternal in that at no point anywhere in the entire manifold is any other point on the manifold absent, all points are ever-present, unending and perpetual.

OK, thats a fair criticism but in my defense our language fails completely to encompass the relationship between past and future implied by a Minkowski manifold, two points in time are contemporaries of each other in exactly the same sense that you and I are contemporaries of each other but personally we have only experienced this along the axis of time thus every word we have to describe such a relationship is imbued with the context of happening within one singular point of time. I'd be glad if you can think of a word that isn't polluted with this assumption that I could likewise use to describe the relationship, cause I can't think of one myself.

Yeah, I would have said conventionally rather than traditionally but I understand. And conventions have validation or else we abandon them as conventions.

The arrow of entropy as the arbiter of time direction is very different to, and I am sure you know, not well reconciled with the basics of special relativity. Entropy is a feature of quanta (ie quantum) non-continuous, dimensionless 'bits of bits' of stuff, relativity is a feature of a topological continuum, the polar opposite of quanta. So of course time in relativity doesn't conform to a quantum convention, how could it? 

I realise there are conventions and they exist mostly to deal or not deal, as the case dictates, with the fact that there are variables in each theory that have no place in the other. That's because, as it stands, the reality is you can only deal with one or the other; and until you somehow miraculously stumble upon the meeting ground that's the way it has to be. Thus the behaviour of point particles in this context is a moot point. A space-time continuum demands that time stretches and deforms according to its mandate, entropy conforms to the gradient of the gravitational curve and it is subordinate to the topology of space time. So, what then?

It's cool, I find him a bit difficult to read, too, even the stuff in English.

Yeah, that sounds about right. And I'd concur that it seems fairly probably that it can have no effect on personal reality. I think, however, that it does effect general reality, for example as the Andromeda paradox suggests, two entities seemingly in a single reality may find that they are actually in two separate ones if they were, by chance, to examine the differences.

However, in that regard, I think it unlikely that observer 1 and observer 2 would be inclined to perceive each other AND the chasms between their realities simultaneously. Our actual physical perceptions are, by their very nature gap-riddled, thus perception on our part is quite significantly made up of 'filler' information gleaned from psychological material. That is to say we only see some of what we are looking at and we use our mental image/reflection of our reality to fill in the gaps in order to see a whole reality. Thus the very mechanism of perception undermines the possibility of perceiving reality beyond our own, so if we were, perchance, to meet something from another reality we would, regardless, frame it in the mental reflection our own reality in order to perceive it, by default, and never see it as anything else.

For the record, I'm not trying to prove any kind of god by this. I don't apologise for any god and I think believing that one's god needs to be defended is the height of stupidity. If your god is 'God' then it doesn't need your protection and it certainly doesn't need you to bully other people out of questioning its existence. I don't engage in that sort of idiocy, so don't worry. If you ask me a specific question, that's different, of course, but unless you asked, don't expect me to insist anything on you.

Not at all. Both Special and General relativity would describe the internal relationships, the geometry, of a fixed space-time manifold, if looked at from such a 'timeless' perspective.

I am honestly a little surprised at your response.

This seems to be your error, from my PoV, that it makes any sense whatever to apply any time-based concepts in the context of the space-time manifold. Unless of course there is some higher dimension along which the 4-dimensional manifold itself changes in a 'time-like' manner.

The many-worlds state-space encompasses the space-time manifold, in its many possible QM probable states.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11002

refers to a book, Schrodinger's Rabbits: The Many Worlds of Quantum by Colin Bruce, which I found extremely helpful in getting a conceptual handle on QM. I read it while it was available to be read on online at that site, as they seem to often to as an introductory boost.

I can't now even give you any quotes from the book that aren't available on that site.

All I have done here is to apply the idea to the states of a space-time manifold instead of just a time-wise perspective of such - I can see no obvious problem with that, once you even partially get your head around QM and that interpretation of MW.

Both are applicable.

Just as we measure a length with ruler, a standard of a known length, we measure time by a sequence of two or more events with a known interaval between them.

Thanks for the answer.  That was very helpful.  Would definition two be better termed as. 

2)  Time is a comparison between between two or more events with known intervals between them and the changing state of a system or systems external to those events.  

Another question.  Could you say that the the know interval between two clicks of the second hand on a clock is a second, and the know distance between the two ends of a meter stick is a meter?  I suppose that is kind of a weird question.  What I'm really trying to ask is can distance and time be know without some kind of comparison.  

They are both a manner by which we perceive the existence of time. The first is a means which is very structured and abstract, the second is a means which is more immediate and intuitive.

Reasons not to define time the first way include:

1. It is counter-intuitive; we perceive no extension in time in our reality, thus our psychology is attuned to intuiting ourselves as a point in time rather than, as a time dimension would suggest, a coherent 'blob' of values stretched out over a finite real valued interval. Our past and future physical values don't factor in our immediate perception so we don't intuit they exist coherently with us.

2. It is abstract; like space we deform the dimension of time in order to apply linear computations to it. With space we are able to be more aware of the deformation we are allowing and able to judge reasonably if it is significantly affecting the accuracy and precision of what we are doing, knowing so little about time as we do we're less able to judge how markedly flattening out the dimension effects the value of our results.

Reasons not to define the second way include:

1. No single degree (or unit) of difference, apparently, applies universally; A good definition is characterised by its invariability over the span of applicable domains. Change happens at wildly varying rates subject to an unwieldy number of physical conditions. To get a handle on the sheer number of variables needed to tweak time units according to rates of change introduces multiple sensitive dimensions to any model of reality decided this way. So ultimately, this definition greatly increases complexity unless you apply it in a vacuum.

So for me, neither is really satisfactory as a complete definition, but each has its value in addressing the few means we presently have with which to perceive the passing of time.

Which, in my opinion, is why looking at the question in terms of spacetime rather than just time or space is so much more useful, since all observers agree upon the spacetime interval between two events.