In a simple model of gravity propagating through dimensions that other particles can’t propagate through, you would in fact end up with gravity falling off as 1/r^3 or faster. That doesn’t happen, so those simple models aren’t any good. And so physicists come up with more complicated models to address that problem. And that’s all I’ll say on that matter, since I don’t entirely understand those models myself.
1, 2, 3, (and probably 4 but I don’t remember for certain exactly where it ends) are hardwired into our brains. This is why primitive tribes who haven’t evolved counting systems still have words for the first few numbers.
Our brains also understand two values of “many”, one being a relatively small amount of many like say half a dozen, and one being a much larger value of many like hundreds. I’ve heard it described as 1, 2, 3, (4?), a few, and many.
We also are hardwired to understand none of something, but 0 as a number is not hardwired into our brains. In fact, whether 0 is a number or not was a subject of great debate back in ancient Greece, the argument basically being how can you have a number of something if you don’t have any of that something?
India usually gets credit for the birthplace of zero as a number.
More complex number/counting systems aren’t necessary until you have more complex bartering and need more detailed placeholders to describe relative value.
Some folks like to ridicule primitive tribes for their lack of counting system and such, but hey, if you never need it in your daily life, does it really matter?
Space and time are certainly inter-related. Some very weird things happen when you start looking at things moving at speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Wikipedia explains a lot of it better than I can in a single message board post:
There are also a lot of theories about the universe having more than 3 basic spacial dimensions, none of them proven yet (as far as I am aware). One tricky thing about these theories is that for most common cases the extra dimensions basically have to collapse down to the three basic dimensions that we are used to, otherwise the theory is easily observably false.
As an example. here is one discussion that you may find interesting:
Thanks everyone, reading the responses so far has helped me to clarify, in my mind, what I meant to ask. So allow me to rephrase my question.
I know there is a school of thought that says our language (ie this culture has a word for black, that culture does not) influences how we percieve the world. That culture with out a word for black would never see the night sky as anything other than a shade of blue for instance.
Is it possible that if we develop a commonly spoken everyday language that could describe spacetime (better than we have today) would we perceive spacetime differently as a culture?
I would say “yes”. Famously some cultures don’t, or didn’t, have words for certain colors, and it did influence how they categorized and grouped aspects of their environment.
Many concepts in astrophysics are very alien to hairless apes, and yes I’d wager that the challenge is not just the phenomena themselves but also limitations of our language. I stated upthread that the word “nothing” causes many misconceptions but also concepts like “free will” once made intuitive sense but now just tie us up in badly-formed questions. There are probably lots more of these that none of us are aware of.
However, while language presents many issues like this, they aren’t insurmountable. Language changes. And, as well as English, we have mathematics, which may have limitations of its own, but is not bound by human intuition.
That was sort of my sense of it @Mijin, but I can barely form the question I want to ask a lot of the time. I’m just an non_formallly educated dude with a lot of time to think of weird seeming stuff, and this interests me enough that I thought it would be neat to get the thoughts of people with more knowledge
Is there any evidence that speakers of the hundreds of major languages perceive spacetime in any way that is different from the rest? (People whose languages have no expression for certain phenomena don’t perceive the world in any way different from those that do, AFAIK. Everything is translatable into any language. That’s why Navaho code talkers were successful during World War II and how Shakespeare can get translated into more than 100 languages, including Klingon.)
The language of spacetime is math. That appears to be universal and minimally affected by translation into spoken languages.
I will admit that I can’t think of any way to formally answer your question with a “no,” but I also can’t think of any way it could be answered with a “yes” either.
I’ve been thinking about this and trying to find something I read a long time ago about color perception in different cultures (unsuccessfully so I can’t really argue with you effectively). The gist of the article was that there was a study done that showed that cultures that don’t have a word for “green” for instance, don’t percieve “green”. Not meaning the specific wave length we see as green, rather it was blue or some such to them.
I agree, math is a perfectly fine language to describe spacetime, but one many(most?) people are not fluent in. I’m not really talking about that kind of “nuts and bolts” perception(for lack of a better term I guess) rather, a more…casual? everyday? everyman? sort of percieving.
I don’t know. The more I think about it, as interesting a question to ponder while idle, it is a sort of fruitless question all the same. It takes a lot of energy to change the inertia of the universe.
This seems an odd way of putting it, as if there is a correct or best set of color terms, and some languages fail to achieve this. Rather, different languages divide up the spectrum in different ways, but this does not affect what colors the speakers of that language actually perceive. For an example where English-speakers seem to fall short, Russian has two color terms, goluboy and siniy, which refer to colors that in English would both be called “blue”. The former Russian term refers to a light blue and the latter to a dark blue. That doesn’t mean that English speakers perceive fewer colors than Russian speakers do, they just give different names to them. A Russian might be puzzled as to why we refer to two such obviously different colors by the same name. But we do perceive them as different, even if when speaking of them we call them “shades” of the same color.
In the long-lost and largely forgotten days of my college-age youth, I read a lot about this. I vaguely agreed with this line of thinking. I recall that one of the critics of this school of thought said of one of the proponents: “He made up his mouth that the had no mind.”
However, I doubt that this could happen, for a reason that I don’t think has been mentioned: Observable space-time relativity effects only happen as scales (in particular, at velocities) that just aren’t known in common human experience.
In relating space and time, there is a conversion factor to convert distances in space into corresponding lengths of time, and that factor is enormous: approx. 186000 miles per second. And the formulas for working with space and time are not simple or obvious (for a non-math-physics major). One odd feature of these equations is that at any speeds that humans commonly experience, the “relativistic” space-time effects become so minute as to be imperceptible. Thus, at any normal speeds that we encounter, we don’t notice any time dilation or space contraction effects. Thus was the universe that Newton observed and described in all his laws, that we know as “Newtonian physics”.
It is only at velocities approaching the speed of light that deviations from Newtonian physics become prominent, and humans simply are not hard-wired to go there.
So I think that is the predominant reason we perceive space and time in the simple Newtonian way we do, and correspondingly have not developed any common linguistics to talk about Lorentz-Fitzgerald style space-time.
See here for a semi-intelligible (for the non-math-physics major) lecture on this, showing all the transformation equations involved, including the Lorentz equations:
The Lorentz transform equations, the addition of velocities and spacetime
The author says of these equations:
(Bold added.)
ETA: Or, to put it another way: In terms of that natural speed of electromagnetism, we humans are slowpokes.
Yeah, that is basically the scientific consensus; that some languages have more colors in their standard color terms set, and that colors tend to be added to a language in the same order.
I made no value judgement, which is entirely your framing.
And indeed this remains the consensus on the topic.
In 1969 psychologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published a study and then book on colors in languages and found that colors tend to be added to languages in the same order. All languages have at least black and white. Then, if they have a third term, it’s red. Then either green or yellow will be added, then the other. And so on.
While 1969 is a hell of a long time ago, you’ll note from that cite that subsequent research has only refined what they found, or found a rare counter-example (while conceding that the vast majority of languages follow the pattern).
And yeah, an additional split of the blue spectrum is one of the very last additions to a language, and it hasn’t happened in English yet.
You might want to search the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which, though interesting, seldom is interpreted as being able to change spacetime or our perception thereof in such a radical manner that the difficulties in understanding the Theory of Relativity are easier to surmount. Studying the maths is hard but probably more fruitful.
This seems an appropriate place to link to the XKCD color survey:
Thank you. This seems to be a great explanation of why English does have a word for “light red” (namely, “pink”), given how old “red” is itself. And why we don’t yet have a word for “light blue”, because “blue” itself is relatively recent. Further, “green” falls between those two extremes, and it is arguable whether or not we have a word for “light green”. (The closest I can think of is “lime”.)