I know some people will probably call me a moron, but hey im still curious if what I have to say would be some valid ideas. Does time exist? or is time just something man made up to explain why now is now, then was then and the yet to be is still the yet to be. Scientist say that in theory time can be bended, manipulated, slowed or even broken. IF you went back in time and tried to change something, could it be done? or is it impossible to change something thats already been done. If I went back in time and tried to kill Hitler, could I do it? Personally I think not, whats done is done, and if you went back in time changing would not only threatin your existence but your very own being there would threaten everything from that minute on. The theory of Chaos says that everything effects everything. Say a butterfly in china lands on a small kids nose, that very well could decide if I live or die tommorrow? A little dramatic? I think not, now if the kid takes one extra minute to play with the butterfly he could make his mother late to the airport and she could miss her flight. Therefore if she was to return home she could very well end up in a car accident that could involve me, or not be in a car accident and the one thats suppse to happen would be me. Now thats on a watered down scale, but I believe its true. So by simply going back in time could alter things greatly to begin with, if time in the first place existed. If you went back in time, the preceding events already occured which in effect created you. In other words going back to a previous time would only be a play back of the event, not a tranport back to what was the present. It has already happened and your there watching the events unfold live. Some people call it the billard effect. If you tried to change something that already happened something else would bounce back to prevent you from doing it. It reminds me of the twilight zone. A guy went back in time and was going to shoot Hitler and stop millions from dieing, BUT the gun wouldnt fire, he kept being interupted by people and so on. He just couldnt make it possible. So does time exist ? or is time a made up fantasy to explain our memory of the constant images being recorded in our head. Personally I dont think time in essence or theory exist. BUT then again I worship Big Bird..... so you decide Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! oh yea I have another question, doesnt have anything to do with time, but I'm curious what other people think about this too. They say that space ends somewhere out there, then whats after that? Scientist say "nothing" how can there be nothing when space is nothing at all? If the universe is expanding, it has to have some place to go...
Dude it must suck to be you. Writing all that and putting all the thought into it just to see that noone gives a shit. heh heh.101
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Zambino, as to your second question of your first mailing: The edge of thew universe looks kinda like the edge of the world, just before you fall off. It may be a bit of a riddle, but you may just be elevated to the abstract level needed to get the real answer. And I don't know any scientists saying that there is nothing beyond that. As to your fist issue. hard issue. I think time does exist, and I would like to know why one should think otherwise. I think introducing the Choas theory is a bit far fetched at the moment; not relevant to the issue. I am in a hurry, so I end this post nmow. Catch you later. Merlijn
Of course time exists. You pay attention to it, don't you? You look at the clock, you worry about being late, etc. Therefore it exists for you. How much more real do you need? If it is real for you it is real. If you think something exists then it exists for you.
So this is the ultimate measure: if you think something exists it does (for you). Why don't we all stop practising science and start telling each other our dreams? Sorry to sound a bit negative Deus, but I have had it with this way of thinking. What is next, will you be advocating the idea that all opinions are equal? I certainly do not hope so; think of the implications.
Do you believe that your dreams are real? Have you ever had a dream so real that the next morning you really had to think about whether it was real or not? I have, occassionally, and until I figure out some way that it must've been a dream, the events in the dream seem pretty real. In the same way, for hundreds of years Newton's Laws were seens as absolutely correct, that was reality for physicists. It wasn't until they discovered things that just didn't fit that they began to doubt, and when other theories that explained things better came up, Newton's Laws started to look less like reality and more like a good approximation of how things interact when they are not too big or too small, and when they are not travelling too fast and are not too hot or too cold. Your reality is defined by you because there is no independant observer to define it for you. We are all within reality, and thus we are unable to define it without bias. Therefore, that which you observe, and in turn, believe, is true for you, it is reality for you. If confronted with strong contradicting evidence, most people will change their minds, and for them reality changes.
Limited knowledge "your reality" what does that mean???? I admit, as everybody should, that we have limited wisdom and knowledge and we do not know the truth. Reality is defined independently of observers. It is not subject dependent. Knowledge and reality are different entites. It is MY / YOUR knowledge and THE reality. Merlijn
This all depends on what exactly you mean by time existing. Time is a dimension, hopefully we can all agree on that. People have a tendency to see time as a somehow different type of dimension, though. I'd say it's very possible that time could be no different in nature than the other 3 dimensions we're familiar with, it's only our perspective that makes it seem different. We're 3 dimensional creatures. We can only perceive 3 dimensions through our senses. Memory is our one faculty we have which can track the 4th dimension, and it only does so by recording the 3 dimensional realities we perceive and leaving a kind of smudged impression of a bunch of 3-D realities that we say combine to make up the past. If you were a 2-D being, a flatlander, what would a 3-D object look like to you? You'd never be able to see or to comprehend the full 3-D object, you could only observe whatever part of it was in your 2-D space. Here's an illustration of that with a sphere shown passing through a plane on the left, and the view of it the flatlanders have shown on the right: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The flatlander simply sees a circle of changing size, and never sees a sphere. So, the flatlander naturally comes to think the circle is being altered, the circle is contracting and expanding... thus there's change going on, thus there's the concept of time. From our higher dimensional reality, however, we can all see that the sphere is the same sphere all along, the sphere isn't changing... it's just that the flatlander is only seeing 2-D slices of it and so will never really be able to understand that all those slices are actually adding up to a 3-D sphere that's there in a complete form all along. Now try the same sorts of ideas, but instead of a 3-D objects viewed from 2-D space, try a 4-D object viewed from 3-D space. Wouldn't it work similarly, the sense of "change" seen by the inhabitants of the 3-D world being basically an illusion caused by only being able to see 3-D slices of the 4-D whole? It may be possible to think of the universe as a sort of 4-D object. This would mean that from the outside perspective, from a higher dimensional perception, there isn't any time in the sense we know it. Everything that ever has and ever will happen in the universe would simply be the infinite series of 3-D slices that make up the existing static 4-D universe... much like how the circles seen by the flatlander are all a part of the complete and unchanging 3-D sphere. Since at the higher dimension there's no actual change going on in our world (simply a continuum of static 3-D slices), and without change there's no time, what we call time would not actually exist from the higher dimensional perspective. Hope my first post here has caused sufficient confusion. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Good post, and welcome. Just one thing I want to point out for the sake of discussion: your flatlander, although only seeing things in 2 dimensions, by your explanation actually experiences 3 dimensions, just as we see things in 3 dimensions (more or less) and experience 4. The flatlander, since he/she can see change in the circle, actually experiences dimensions 1, 2, and 4. Do you suppose that perhaps time is different from other dimensions in that you experience it whenever you experience any other dimension? In the case, using your top-down perspective, perhaps time belongs higher than 4 on the heirarchy. Thoughts?
Deus, As to: your last post: I think you are taking the analogy a bit too literally. as to your reply to my post: Get out of your frame, please! How about: "Reality needs no definition to exist, what I meant is: 'It is not subject dependent'." (oh I wrote that in the first place). In the same vein: did Pluto and Charon need to be observed in order to come into existence? I think not.
I think you’d sort of be right, if you put it this way: in order to experience anything, we need time. That doesn’t have to make time different from the other dimensions though, it just means we have to have a limited perspective (relative to the total # of dimensions of the universe) in order for us to exist as we know it. (If in the 4-D universe every moment of time is static and done, no movement possible, that’s obviously not the type of existence we know.) I don’t think I’d say the other dimensions require time, even though of course they require it to be observed by us. One thing you can say is that to have a dimension we can call "time" there have to be multiple dimensions (one to call "time", one to be directly observed). Take a 1-D universe… the universe is just a line. The only lower perspective to take is 0-D, which’d be either a point or nothing I guess, and you can see there’d be no way to perceive change or movement of any sort and so the concept of time would be meaningless. Once you get into a 2-D universe, and any higher number of dimensions, you can have time in your universe so long as your perspective stays below the number of actually existing dimensions. You can have a 1-D universe without time, and you can have 2+ dimensional universes with or without time depending on if your perspective is of a lower number of dimensions. My main point though was that you don't need to have time be different than the other dimensions, because if you jump up to a perspective that’s as many dimensions as actually exist then what you used to call time when you were at a lower perspective wouldn’t seem any different in nature from width, height, etc.
I'm not an idealist, so I'm not about to pretend there's no physical reality out there, but it's not like you can ignore internal realities either. With your example of Pluto and Charon, they did have to be observed in order to gain a more direct type of existence. Existence in the mind is the only type of existence that we can ever directly experience, even if it may be caused by an independently existing thing. In other words, I agree that there's an objective reality out there but things don't take on much meaning until they enter someone's subjective personal reality.
Hi, Hoth ... First: Welcome to Sciforums. Second: "The flatlander simply sees a circle of changing size, and never sees a sphere." Wouldn't it be more appropriate to say the flatlander sees a disc of chang- ing size? Just a thought. Take care Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
If the sphere is hollow, couldn't it be a circle? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Actually it's kind of hard to imagine what a flatlander would see. If they're on the plane theirself they couldn't see the whole circle or disc at once, they'd have to see some sort of flat representation of the half they're facing... I think. Maybe it'd look like a line? :bugeye: Thanks for the welcomes.
time... Time, space and mater are cage elements created by God to trap our soul in this real world, wich is actually a great illusion. We'll see more reality if we can take a spiritual journey, escaping from our body, or after dead... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
