There cannot be an infinite amount of time between two points in time.

Walking? No. Too slow for the effect to be measurable.

Yes, agreed.

Agreed.

Yes.

So what? What is the point of this? Yes, experiments must be designed taking into account the precision of the sensors and the expirmental method. So what?

 

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I don't recall you but I assume you are yet another socket puppet of the same person. It gives the false impression there are several people supporting the same bogosity. How's that working for you so far?

 

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Einstein also suggested that we not get hung up on clocks and just think of any old physical system operating in its own way. It may be that, for any physical system, there is a quantization of time, but this will require a new theory other than GR.

 

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I would disagree instead saying, the thread demonstrates no matter what level of education, intelligence, or physics knowledge, the axiomatic simplicity of time is counter intuitive and therefore most often, too difficult for people to resolve its observable and factual evidence void of personal distortions.

 

I'm not sure that "need new GR" follows as I think the smallest time interval yet defined is the "Plank time" or Tp = 5.39 × 10-44 seconds. Why would that postulated "dam small" discreteness require a new GR?. If you can prove that time is digital (not analogue) then may not get the Nobel prize for physics, but would be strong candidate. Nobel himself would never consider that or many that have been given as "clearly most useful for mankind" - I forget the English translation of his words in the will, but that was the sprit of his requirements for awards.

 

Nice question about the continuity of time, and I don't mind at all that you opened the thread with the core issue up front. It saves time.

We already know that there are uncertainty principle limits on position vs momentum in particle physics. For one thing, you'd have to know where that limit and the uncertainty principle itself actually comes from. You will notice that a limit on the certainty of position is one that is in relation to other matter in other inertial FoRs, and that would mean that relativity also comes into play. Momentum determination involves measurements of both space and time, so that if you do not suspect, as I do, that space is actually the same dimension as time related to each other by the constant c, then the issue of where the uncertainty principle itself actually derives remains at issue.

The uncertainty principle has been used to resolve so many dilemmas in quantum theory, I've actually lost count.

But to answer your question more directly by means of a relevant thought experiment, consider this idea:

When a photon of a fixed energy is absorbed by an electron or other particle of matter, the energy of that electron or particle increases by a quantized amount. When a photon of a fixed energy is captured by the event horizon of a black hole that is constituted from all of the accumulated matter in the entire visible universe since a hypothetical BB, that would increase its energy (and also its velocity relative to other FoR as well as where it was before the photon was absorbed) by a much smaller amount.

If there were an infinitude of energies that fell between those limits, that would be possible only if time itself was continuous. And here we can answer with definite certainty that the answer to that question is YES, because one may choose between any direction of motion out of an infinitude of infinitely divisible solid angle from which to observe the difference between those two energies. It is actually much easier to respond to your question if we talk only in terms of energy and not matter, and this choice is no accident. The momentum of something traveling at c defeats all sorts of anomalies involved with the spacing between particles of matter and replaces it with issues of wavelength and energy.

Time is, for all intents and purposes, continuous between any range of any vacuum energy or field events separated by intervals that are larger than the amount of light travel time required to traverse the Planck length. Below that limit, all energy events become virtual.

 

Since you brought it up. Choose chapter 1 Speeding. On page 1-6 Sample problem 3 'How Slow is Speeding? There's an actual prediction for a somebody walking next door at 1 meter per second. Is the delta .000000000000001 second meaureable?
http://www.eftaylor.com/download.html

 

The point is that theoretically time is a continuum, but practically we have to divide it into measurable chunks. I understand it's now possible to measure an attosecond.

However, does that mean we can build a device that reliably counts a sequence of (equally reliably generated) attosecond pulses? That we can't measure time continuously doesn't mean time is discontinuous, and as I said, the theories are based on continuous functions.

Clock time however, is necessarily like the natural rather than the real numbers, and it always will be. So . . .

That's an interesting but somewhat paradoxical idea: "any old physical system" must absorb and emit energy in discrete amounts (at the most fundamental level), and we have to count something that such a system outputs (how do you count changes in temperature, for instance?). Clocks have to be based on regular periodic motion of some kind.

Actually the clock doesn't need to be that regular: you still get a way to order events counting your own heartbeats, or breaths. In fact any "repetitious" kind of signal will do, it really depends more on how fine a "time structure" you need to do this event ordering thing.

 

With a temperature logger.

Not really. Though they are less common, there are clocks that utilize mass transfer (hourglass) and radioactive decay (radiocarbon dating)...which is also sort of a mass transfer process. Any predictable process can be used as a clock. Indeed, human aging is used to tell time (judging how old a person is).

 

Thanks for addressing the topic and the question about the "how" of different clock rates. I wrapped up my participation after post #63, and then kept my eye out for on-topic responses to the "how" question. I acknowledged the other on-topic responses in post #74, and I acknowledge your response here.

The "how" question is allowed in P&M. Any answer with an actual suggestion of mechanics beyond the curvature of spacetime is not appropriate for P&M, so the thread reached its logical conclusion way back then.

 

Ah, more Plank time mythology.

GR assumes continuity. If someone wants to get rid of continuity, they are welcome to, they just need to replace GR. This is what hundreds of theoretical physicists work on.

 

I like this passage from Einstein:

"Clocks, for which the law of motion is any kind, however irregular, serve for the definition of time. We have to imagine each of these clocks fixed at a point on the non-rigid reference-body. These clocks satisfy only the one condition, that the “readings” which are observed simultaneously on adjacent clocks (in space) differ from each other by an indefinitely small amount."

We can use whatever we want, with whatever regularity, just as long as infinitesimal transport does not change readings.

 

Russ, all of those things involve some measureable and quantified change. Sand in an hour glass comes in grains and radioactive decay happens in incremental steps. Even aging, is a process that involves biological changes, which because they involve the relationships between atoms, molecules and more complex structures, occur in some quantifiable manner, even where those changes are yet unobserved.

This whole discussion seems to be a debate comparring our experience and measurement of time and our concept of time. What we can measure and observe is limited by the nature of matter, which makes it quantifiable. How we conceptually imagine time as an underlying phenomena, is not so limited.., but it cannot be observed and measured.

 

Of course. The point was simply that they are not periodic processes. That's what alfa brane was asking about. That's the misconception that some of our resident crackpots operate on.

 

I was reading the response more in the context of the last paragraph below, which lists breath and heart rates as irregular clock rates.

I don't always see the full context of a discussion, unless I go back and read past posts again.

 

In general you need to order events, and you use a local "clock" even if that's only your own sense of time passing. This passing of time gets harder to even define when you try measuring really small intervals of time or really small distances (how far away does a mirror need to be such that light "reaches" it and "returns"?). Reliability gets technically hard to, um, rely on.

Einstein is however, quite careful to define a notion of time in terms of light reflecting from a mirror. The time for the round trip depends only on where the mirror is when the reflection occurs, and of course the speed of light. Einstein "naturally" assumes there is a classical distance between the source of light and the mirror.

 

All those are still fundamentally a change of position of energy at a constant rate (periodic motion), your interpretation attempts to obfuscate that.

 

Huh? "Change of position of energy" is a meaningless phrase. Is that what you really meant to say? And no, radioactive decay is most certainly not a periodic motion.

My one and only point was that it is a common misunderstanding that a process must be periodic to use it to tell time. There was no obfuscation there.

 

Yes, energy changes position in space (it moves) if that makes it clearer.

The vibration of an unstable atomic nucleus causes it to emit a radioactive particle; those emissions from many atoms are periodic. The underlying cause is motion, that their instability cause’s an ejection due to nucleus vibrations at regular intervals also is periodic motion. It would be like claiming the blink of a pulsar is not periodic motion when we can observe only its flash and not its spin.

Even if we don’t directly observer the underlying motion of a periodic interval it does not mean we can freely claim that motion did not cause that interval. I know of no other way for observable change to occur in the Universe other than by motion (a change of position of energy).

I said there was obfuscation because you misstated your examples as a demonstration of time keeping without periodic motion when they are examples of the opposite, an interval of motion (periodic motion).

 

All your referring to are measurement. You're saying the measurement device is the natural phenomena. Your interpretations are convulated bullshit. Useless information.