Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

224 CHAPTER 52. MANY-MINDS PHYSICS
• Many Observers: Many Minds: Many Perspectives: Democracy.
Classical physics is based on the idea of One Mind as a unique aether or
reference frame, but this idea collapsed with the Michelson-Morley experiment,
and then came Einstein’s bold elimination of the aether altogether
leaving an emptiness filled with “relative” space and time against a universal
background of “invariant physical laws”. Einstein thus took the step from
“unique” to “universal” with the magic of “universal” of being many-faceted
while at the same time One, like God.
Einstein gave the observer not one reference frame or coordinate system,
but overwhelmed the observer with all reference frames asking the observer to
coordinate observations in all frames. This is like giving a person an infinite
set on eyes moving with respect to the observer and asking the observer
to coordinate all the images from all the eyes. To do this Einstein asked
the observer to change his concept of space and time according to certain
(Lorentz) transformations required to maintain “invariance”.
But Einstein’s Universal Mind was led to very strange paradoxes imbedded
in the Lorentz transformations of Einstein’s special theory of relativity,
and the strangeness became monumental in Einstein’s general theory of relativity
with a “curved space-time” which nobody could come to grips with.
In politics the idea of democracy is still strong and spreading over the
world and maybe it is now for its counterpart in physics to emerge in the
form of many-minds physics. In many-minds physics the idea of a unique
or universal observer is abandoned, and instead it is accepted that different
observers can have different perspectives without one perspective being
chosen as the “preferred one”, like a unique aether. Each observer ties his
coordinate system to himself, that is each observer only observes through his
own pair of eyes and does not worry about what observation he would make
with eyes detached from his body.
In many-minds physics the pertinent question is to what extent different
observers agree on e.g. distances between different objects.
52.2 The Observer of Relativity Theory
The mantra in relativity is that somehow observations should be made invariant
under choice of coordinate systems or observer reference frame. In
Einstein’s special relativity the basic postulate is that all observers should