I don't follow. Can you lay your thinking out a little more clearly?

Have you read the book: Flatland?

Yes.

So, the same logic at play just for us existing in a progressive flow of the fourth dimension being time...?

Describe the situation you are imagining, including all of the dimensions, even the ones we can't see.

Well think of a camera taking a timelapse photo of a flower. The colors are changing but the object exists spatially in the same place? I'm on my phone so sorry for the crappy posts.

The point in this thread has been the question of whether two truly distinct things can be in the same place at the same time while remaining distinct. I don't see how the flower fits this. Explain.

I was more leaning towards the point of the colors changing wrt. to the timelapse photo of the flower. Does that clarify anything?

Physical objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. — SophistiCat


They do at the center of a black hole, don't they? Time stops, so I don't know if "same time" means anything there. — frank

As does space. Gravitational singularities - the center of black holes - are currently either considered to be volumeless or unknowable in terms of space. Its part of the spacetime paradigm, from which gravitational singularities were first predicted.

At any rate, it's understood that there are no separate objects at the center of black holes. The vacuum field comes to mind, but even then, there wouldn't be individual particles in gravitational singularities - this from everything I've read up on. Their spatiotemporal location is determined by surrounding givens that are spatiotemporal.

At any rate, it's understood that there are no separate objects at the center of black holes — javra

Fine. Two fields can occupy the same space. How's that?

Even if that is true, we cannot put history aside. History of something is its property. Two things, even if the same size, color, weight, shape and in the same location, are not the same things if they have different history. — elucid

You’re talking about the experience of an entity: its fifth dimensional aspect. With the same size, colour, weight, shape and in the same location in spacetime, two ‘things’ that reach this point coincidentally from different trajectories not only have different histories, but may have different futures, as well. When measured or observed in spacetime, they cannot be distinguished from each other in that moment, and would be the same ‘thing’ to an observer.

But from a five-dimensional awareness, they are two separate entities because we are aware of their different history. So even if they combine in that moment and become one physical ‘object’, the fact that we knew them to be separate prior doesn’t just vanish, but becomes a complex history of the object in the experience of the fifth-dimensional observer. Without this fifth-dimensional awareness of history, any observation of the two objects would merely relate three-dimensional spatial location changes to different points in time (the fourth dimension). When all of these are identical, there would be no way to distinguish between the two ‘objects’ at the point of observation/measurement.

Fine. Two fields can occupy the same space. How's that? — frank

:grin: Fields of what?

Na, I'm in general agreement with @petrichor on this one. Were two fields to occupy the exact same space at the exact same time, they'd be one and the same field. Edit: For greater precision: this for that span of time in which the exact same space is occupied, even if this now singular object is in some way a type of hybrid of it's previously two or more parent objects.

Electromagnetic field (the universal one) and a gravitational field.

Why would we think of them as the same field?

Hm, not my field of expertise. To simplify things for shmucks such as myself: I'd imagine that if they do occupy the same space at the same time, it would be analogous to temperature and pressure being two ways of viewing the same physical given. But not two separate physical givens.

Your flower is one object in different states at different times. That's not what we are talking about in this thread.

To simplify things for shmucks such as myself: I'd imagine that if they do occupy the same space at the same time, it would be analogous to temperature and pressure being two ways of viewing the same physical given. But not two separate physical givens. — javra

Temp and pressure relate by way of volume. They only track with a constant volume.

A temperature field is not the same thing as an electromagnetic field, though they occupy the same space.

A temperature field is not the same thing as an electromagnetic field, though they occupy the same space. — frank

So then I'll ask: if a temperature field and an electromagnetic field occupy the exact same space at the exact same time, in which way are they two different physical givens? (Rather than being two ways of appraising the same physical given.)

There is no such physical thing as a temperature field.

As for such things as the EM field:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

And the gravitational field is spacetime itself.

There is no such physical thing as a temperature field. — petrichor

Cool. What kind of object is a temperature field?

Temp and pressure relate by way of volume. They only track with a constant volume. — frank

Wanted to add that they also relate by way of causation, specifically they (to the extent they are considered different) bidirectionally cause each other. But this can get into tricky issues, I think.

Cool. What kind of object is a temperature field? — frank

A conceptual object?

A conceptual object? — javra

I think you mean abstract object. A number is an abstract object. Is that what temperature fields are?

I think you mean abstract object. A number is an abstract object. — frank

Yea, abstractions we're aware of are conceptual to us.

Is that what temperature fields are? — frank

Well, you're the one who brought up temperature fields. I was only using temperature and pressure as an analogy. I thought you'd know what they are when bringing them up.

More soberly, temperature - as in cold and hot - is a cognitive abstraction relative to the particular makeup of lifeforms. Scientific models of temperature are entwined with our cognitive abstractions of cold and hot. But this bring the conversation into fields far removed from that of the thread.

I thought you'd know what they are when bringing them up. — javra

There's no clear cut answer. Whether a temperature field is a physical or abstract object (it's certainly not a mental object) is a philosophical question.

When we talk of objects in a thread like this, asking if they can occupy the same space at the same time, we need to be careful that we are talking about actual physical entities.



Consider a population density map. It is sort of like a field. But is there any real thing out there that is a population field? No. There are just individual humans arranged in various concentrations. Temperature is the same sort of thing. What is temperature? It is motion in atoms. When you understand it this way, you see that there is no actual temperature field. Modeling it at a high level as a field might be useful, but for metaphysical discussions like this, we need to be sure we are talking about the real things that actually exist out there, not just the convenient ways we think about things in high-level models.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory_of_gases

Cool. So why is the electromagnetic field a physical object, but a temperature field is an abstract object?

So why is the electromagnetic field a physical object, but a temperature field is an abstract object? — frank

The EM field is probably also just a feature of models we use. In a grand unified field theory, we reduce everything to one. And that's very likely to be the correct picture.

If all of the particles that made up the Empire State Building had the EMPTY space removed from them there would be an object about the size of a grain of rice left. With so much empty space in every object it might be possible to squeeze in another object or two. How the hell it could be done I have no idea though.

The EM field is probably also just a feature of models we use. — petrichor

It's considered by physicists to be a physical object. Do you disagree with them?

It's considered by physicists to be a physical object. Do you disagree with them? — frank

I'll link again to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energy, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model that define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, or forces, are merged into a single force. Although this unified force has not been directly observed, the many GUT models theorize its existence. If unification of these three interactions is possible, it raises the possibility that there was a grand unification epoch in the very early universe in which these three fundamental interactions were not yet distinct.

Experiments have confirmed that at high energy, the electromagnetic interaction and weak interaction unify into a single electroweak interaction. GUT models predict that at even higher energy, the strong interaction and the electroweak interaction will unify into a single electronuclear interaction. This interaction is characterized by one larger gauge symmetry and thus several force carriers, but one unified coupling constant. Unifying gravity with the electronuclear interaction would provide a theory of everything (TOE) rather than a GUT. GUTs are often seen as an intermediate step towards a TOE.

This is the direction in which physics proceeds. Things once thought distinct are shown to be one thing. Einstein famously showed equivalence of mass and energy. Maxwell earlier showed the magnetic and electric fields to be one thing.

We model things at different levels. Sometimes, as with something like geopolitics, modeling it all in terms of the lowest-level particle interactions would be unwieldy. So we use higher-level abstractions, such as "nations" and "regions" and "strategic interests".

You could have a map showing crime density and another showing poverty and another showing disease rates. You could then say that the crime field and the poverty field and the disease field are three things occupying the same space. But that would mean misunderstanding what these are. They aren't physical things. Going down to lower levels, it is revealed that crime and disease and whatnot are all reducible to the way particles are arranged in space and time.

Consider a pile of clay cubes and a clay dinosaur. They seem like different things at a high level. But if we ask what they are at a more basic level, they are both just different forms of clay. And if we compare clay to wax, we see that they are actually different ways of arranging the same basic stuff. And this continues until it is all just different arrangements of one underlying substance. And the only real things are the bottom-most fundamental constituents of reality. All the higher-level stuff is just convenient ways of modelling. We mentally carve the world up into objects like dogs and trees because it is useful to do so.

Notice that as we go down to more and more basic things, to smaller and smaller things, there are fewer and fewer different kinds of things. At the level of planets, no two are alike. There are gazillions of ways to arrange matter at that scale. But at the scale of amino acids, there are far fewer unique structures possible. Go down still further and there are fewer still. We can expect that at the bottom, there is just one. And the fact that we see this trend of fewer unique things as we go down suggests strongly that matter is not infinitely divisible. If it were, there'd be an infinite number of ways to arrange matter at any scale. It would be unlikely that we'd see such things as electrons being all the same.

Physics generally proceeds by unification. There is no reason to expect otherwise.