Philosophy and CV

[meeno8]

Way back in 1980, when I was 'forced' (nobody held a gun to my head or anything like that, it was just that the main objective was to complete a BA in something in anticipation of moving on to get the MA and PhD in S. Asian Languages & Civilization at U. of Chicago) to switch majors from music composition to philosophy, our Nitaidas Ji told me it would be helpful to become familiar with the problem space in the field of philosophy.

One of the problems that has always intrigued me is that of time.  Philosophers throughout written history have put their own slant on it,  but Einstein, a physicist, came up with something extremely insightful in his special theory of relativity well over a century ago, which is that time slows down as you approach the speed of light.  That has been proven in numerous experiments, so it is no longer mere theory.

Currently (the subject of many a Hollywood film and series) it is proposed that time travel is theoretically feasible, and there are some experiments in the laboratory that are interesting:


For present purposes, the interesting fact is a curious property: for some observers tachyons travel backwards in time.
- sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/spacetime_tachyon/index.html 

[meeno8]

It behooves us to seek to update CV philosphy since Baladeva's era in the 18th century. It is not just time, but the nature of gravity as well. Sir Isaac Newton in the prior century described gravity as a law of attraction, which was later updated by Enstein as he described the curvature of space/time influencing the orbits of the planets around the sun, which in turn was verified by numerous experiments since. There is also the posited particle known as a graviton.
"And even though we have never observed a graviton, we know a great deal about them, if they are real. First, since the range of the force due to gravity is infinite and the force due to gravity weakens as one over the square of the distance between two objects (i.e. 1/r 2 ), the graviton must have zero mass. We know this because if the photon had mass, it would change the “2” in the exponent and that “2” has been established with incredible precision. Like massless photons, gravitons should travel at the speed of light."

- www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/what-are-gravitons/

[meeno8]

I guess at some point it begs the question: What type of particle is the jiva itself, if indeed it is a particle like other particles?