Is Time Real? What Is Time?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Kaiduorkhon, Mar 12, 2007.

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  1. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    I recommend a course on creative writing. When I see such a block of letters I normally just skip it, when it consists of junk like time is a fiction then I skip it quickly.

    Yes time is real, it seems once upon a time there was a big bang and ever since then Time thought that was a very bad idea and is determined to make all our little sub atomic particles expire back into the abyss.

    Time is my favorite subject in physics, I believe there is in fact an arrow of time.. there is no cycle or if there is it has its own rules not tied to ours.


    However if one knows enough variables he can predict the future, this doesn't mean time is a farse. And the notion that time is only an object of human conscious is silly, an atom doesn't have a conscious yet it also decays with time.

    Relativity tells us time is affected by energy, and energy in the form of velocity and gravity. This means since everything is in motion relative to everything else there is no way we can sit down and calculate times true value, but it must have one. Time must have a constant rate of progress else relativity wouldn't be so accurate, then again we haven't been taking these measurement very long but we can only make assumptions based on evidence no matter how short our period of enlightenment is compared to the age of the universe. If we notice our clocks rates are changing in experiments in 2,000 years then we can start wondering, however until then I think its safe to say time must have a steady rate of change.. it must be a constant vector and a reality of the universe.

    I would imagine if one could sit back and subtract all the dilation from velocity and gravitation in the universe one would find time is in a hurry to make the universe expire.. while the universe seems built in a way to slow down time as much as possible. Makes me think of the battle between the nuclear force and gravity in a star.. the weaker yet steady force wins in the end...
     
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  3. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    You are wrong, just because an atom decays over what ''we call'' a time period, is not an evidence that an atom personally, subjectively experiences a time frame. Time does not necesserily equal change, in fact.

    In recent conversations with alphanumeric, time can in fact cease to exist at all, in the way we experience it. For there to be a change, or succession of events, there needs to be a true defined arrow - in fact, time requires it has a flow; modern physics is clearly quite indicating that time does not have a flow. In fact, there may be no such thing as an absolute set of events which defines a change, as found in the Wheeler de Witt equation, which comes from quantizing Einsteins field equations.
     
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  5. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    Change has nothing to do with time, time does exist and yes it is a one way vector or arrow and until someone proves otherwise by building a time machine thats IT. You can speculate all you want nobody has ever come to us from the future and we have never witnessed a state of localy frozen time. As you cannot find anyone today where they were at yesterday.. that means there is in fact an arrow of time.

    I'd like if you could explain how there could be no arrow of time, defining change doesn't cut it with me and loopholes in theory don't mean much either. I want to know where I can go in the universe to see time cease to exist.
     
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  7. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    No offense, but you must have a narrow understanding of why we even sense a time pass:

    Time is due to a gene called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus, present in many animals, even bugs.

    This is why we have atleast several clocks in the human body, including the clock we sense as that inexorable arrow pointing in a certain directionality. I believe what General Relativity says, and in face of the facts, I also believe time is a construct of our genetics, not some cosmic arrow pointing in the sky.

    Even if you wanted to have an arrow of time, how do you define? There is no specification of a center of a universe? How does one even draw an arrow to conclude it's linear in its framework? Time is not linear. Time is more like a sphere, with a geometry. And every point on that geometry was the beginning of time.
     
  8. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    So broken eggs do unsplatter, we just don't see it happen?
     
  9. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    I find it very hard to believe AlphaNumeric is encouraging this kind of dribble. Are you serious your basically playing the whole perception thing.. thats for philosophy not science. Would you prefer we just toss our hands up and give up since our perception is lying to us ??

    The center of the universe??? Seriously? There is no center of the universe because there is no prefered frame of reference, actually if you want to be specific at one time me and you were at the center of the universe it simply expanded to this point.

    And the arrow of time means time starts at inflation, and goes forward.. it can go faster, slower and it can appear to stop from an observers perspective... but it always goes forward. Hence arrow...
     
  10. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    No, I actually disagreed with him and have explained why in this thread. GD misunderstood something I said and he's just parroting back things he's read and misunderstood. He read some essays by competent physicists on the subject of quantum gravity and now seems to be throwing it into any thread he can manage, in attempts to appear well read. Of course trying to engage him in a discussion where he engages his brain is fruitless as he doesn't actually understand things like the Wheeler de Witt equation or the important differences between things like typical general relativity or quantum mechanics and the formalism within which the WdW equation is constructed.

    There's a great deal of subtly involves in how you view space and time in a quantum gravity formalism as you're talking about the very 'arena' within which events occur, rather than talking about things in said arena (as you would with quantum electrodynamics say). Furthermore there's the issue of how coordinates used in physics are not automatically the physical directions we normally think of. GD has demonstrated he doesn't understand polar or Schwarzchild coordinates, despite polar coordinates being required knowledge for things like electromagnetism, which he claims to have done a bit of 'work' in but his attempt in Pseudo got completely destroyed. If he doesn't grasp something as basic as a high school concept the specifics of diffeomorphic invariance and coordinate charts on non-trivial manifolds are definitely out of his grasp, hence his confusion.

    To give an example of how common misconceptions can arise consider the Wiki page where it says "In fact, the principle of general covariance in general relativity implies that global evolution per se does not exist; t is just a label we assign to one of the coordinate axes.". Its tempting to view this as saying "Time doesn't exist" but what it actually means is that if you are not working with the nice Euclidean notions of space and time and have highly non-trivial coordinate structures to consider (ie all this stuff about diffeomorphisms) then you cannot apriori assume that the coordinates labelled with familiar letters like 't' or 'r' stand for time or radius. This is precisely the point Temur is trying to explain to GD in the thread I just linked to. What might be the 'time coordinate' to one person somewhere in a space-time might be the spacial coordinate to another person. This occurs in Kerr black holes where two coordinates associated to 'time' and 'space' swap roles within the ergosphere, allowing for such nifty things as the Penrose process.

    And to make it clear here by 'time direction' I mean the one whose metric sign upon diagonalisation is negative under the -+++ convention. In the ergosphere this becomes +-++.

    And you have a profoundly ignorant view of how science is done and your approach to it is very dishonest. The fact you have the hypocrisy to call other people's understanding 'narrow' when you make no attempt to expand your own in any intellectually honest way borders on the contemptible.
     
  11. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Wait a minute, I never said alphanumeric agreed with my latest post. I said we were involved in a discussion on the subject, and behold, I am talking about it here. Learn not to jump the gun.

    And with that all aside cracker, you've made absolutely no comment on the biological fact that our sense of time is due to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

    Let me guess why? (sarcasm)
     
  12. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Secondly, I also never stated that there was a center to the universe. Re-read my post.
     
  13. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    You are clearly using his name to add weight to your misunderstanding of time.

    You state there is no specification of a center of a universe as a question?? So I cleared it up for you it seemed to me you were asking if there being no specified center of the universe from our frame of reference was a correct statement. Time is a VECTOR it starts at the beginning and goes one way, think about this and please really try to understand this example.

    I give you a set of coordinates to reach, 3 spatial coordinates and 1 time coordinate. Why do I have to give you a time coordinate? Because if you go to that spot in space yet at the wrong place in time you are not at the correct location. Now if you show up late.. then you have missed the chance to be there at all. You have to consider EVERYTHING is in motion relative to everything else, that means we will never be exactly where we are now ever again. Which way do we go in spacetime? we go forwards, how do we know that? Because we cannot see the future, all we can see is the past light cone. Even the light from your monitor travels in time to your eyes, this is because time moves forward faster than light moves. So time is real, its a moving vector and though we can slow it down we cannot turn it backwards. Even in black holes where time theoretically goes backwards so does space, so in effect outside our universe because not only is time bent backwards on itself so is space, again this gives us no way to go back in time in the universe we would have to in effect leave our universe entirely to seperate ourselves from time and space. However its debatable if in doing that you would escape time or space you may just discover a new space and a new time separate from this one.

    And what tells us that there is indeed time and it goes forward, anything we can do slows down time. That means if you take away all the energy and mass in the entire universe you still have time and its moving much faster it doesn't go away at all. The only way to exit this arrow of time is to exit this space as well more or less, so you might say time as we know it doesn't exist inside a singularity.. but thats it.

    Other than that what I am trying to describe to you is how time moves forward and how that forward movement is a vector and not an illusion. The only way one could step back and view the universe in motion with the future light cone is by a preferred frame of reference which does not exist but for theoretical work, its not a reality we can ever go to in this lifetime lol.
     
  14. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Shush for a moment. I said exactly this:

    ''And with that all aside cracker, you've made absolutely no comment on the biological fact that our sense of time is due to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.''

    Now, forget all that above. Quite clearly in the sentance just provided, you cannot deny that we sense a time because of a gene, now can you?

    So how does this justify an arrow of time. Explain this to me, so that I may come to understand?
     
  15. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Also, it should be common knowledge now that me and alphanumeric rarely agree. Secondly, the thread in which this was all discussed, was only just recently closed, so it's not as if I was referring to alphanumeric because ''we agreed'' - it was a topic I was currently in talks about - nevertheless, alphanumeric will agree he's come to understand a new thing in physics he did not know about before. That is the timelessness exhibited by General Relativity and how it causes the problem of time in quantum mechanics, if you'd like to know.
     
  16. NO1 I Am DARKNESS Registered Senior Member

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    It is possible to configure Time is Computer Generated. Like saying quartz movement is mechanical. Maybe I'll finish this thought later when I come back.
     
  17. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    I really don't see your point. Humans are aware of the passage of time because of a biological oddity which other animals do not have? Even granting that, what has that to do with the concepts of time and entropy in physics? Nothing.
     
  18. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    Animals are not aware of their own existence and its significance either, they are aware of food, shelter, the opposite sex, and other survival things. Why does our awareness of whats around us matter? You think if we were not aware of the passing seasons and minutes and were only concentrated on NOW as an animal is that time wouldn't exist?

    Thats wrong in many ways. I don't care what gene or what neurons mark the passing of time, that is irrelevant. OUr perception of the world around is is complex and advanced, animals perception deals with its survival only, we have evolved so that our survival depends on seasons and time, crops and such. We can see plainly in the earth that even though before humans were alive to percieve time, time existed. The records we view in the universe are not an illusion, perception is simply understanding nothing more. I bet if you go back in evolution when that gene came around we started planting crops and marking the seasons.. does that mean there were no seasons before then?? of course not. We weren't around bilions of years ago yet time moved on without us to watch it.

    If you can't accept that then you my friend can't accept anything you see at all, you may as well believe you are in a sim game or something. What do you want us to do stop trying to understand the universe and see if it goes away? lol I don't know about this one.
     
  19. Saquist Banned Banned

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    Time is not an abstract.
    Time simply put is a description of movement.
    Thus Time is movement.
     
  20. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Time is the stuff that Maxwell's demon doesn't have enough of.

    Since each molecule of gas has an average velocity, and occupies one of N 'partitions' the demon is unable to determine when any of them is approaching the trapdoor. Because the demon can't determine the path of any molecule this is "missing information" and we all know what that is--thermodynamic entropy.

    There is a strong connection (apparently) to algorithmic entropy. The demon is equivalent to those programs that never halt for a given Turing machine, i.e. they never print a result.
     
  21. Shadow1 Valued Senior Member

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    i think the 5th time that this thread have been opened, after me (the fourth i think)
     
  22. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Say what?
    No objections to: "the demon is unable to determine when any molecule is approaching the trapdoor"? Why can't it 'see' which molecules have the required velocity, and sort them by opening the trapdoor? Does this violate the second law of thermodynamics?

    Why can't the demon be just a spring-loaded mechanism which is activated by those molecules with a high enough velocity that the trapdoor opens? Does an algorithm exist that defeats the second law somehow?

    Note that Maxwell originally used this thought experiment to support the experimental evidence that heat flows from a hotter to a colder place, or equivalently, molecules with kinetic energy will occupy as much space as possible.
    So how does all this affect our notion of what time is?
     
  23. NO1 I Am DARKNESS Registered Senior Member

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    Ok, I think the OP and (you)? would like to see an updated IMG:

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2010
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