what makes a 'dimension' to the scientific community?

So then, there's like, no time delay at all when someone LOOKS at the end of a ruler to notice whether it coincides with the dimension of something else you are measuring with it? I suppose you could "feel it", something like they did with cubits, but the nerve impulses from your fingers require TIME to reach your brain too, don't they? I was simply observing, any measurement in this universe requires time for an observer to make the measurement.

All of those ancient measurement methods involved errors in parallax, and cumulative errors compounded by measuring devices used at different ambient temperatures. Modern scientific calibration standards are more precise, and are even more heavily dependent on time.

Length is actually the only thing we ever measure or sense in this universe, and we haven't the slightest idea what it actually is.

 

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What is that supposed to mean?

Why do you think we don't know what length is?

 

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Either you slid off the point, or I missed your original point. You're apparently referring to the signal propagation time required to take the reading. May as well also talk about the time your brain takes to process it too. But I can't see how this has any relevance to anything: So what?

Both halves of that are total nonsense.

 

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paddoboy,

I agree, however there are arguments that space does have actual dimensions, it seems to be a bounded system, whereas time is an independent permissive metaphysical condition and may not be subject to any physical laws. It would make no difference either way, IMO.

Thanks for that "Universe from nothing" . Yes that makes perfect sense to me as well. Whatever it is, I cannot believe the origin of change was very complicated.

Musing: Perhaps an instant collapse of nothing into a singularity of something containing the potential of every dynamic event possible (or probable) in the original permissiveness. Whatever it was, it seems to have been instantaneous, perhaps a single mega-quantum event where everything DID happen all at once (inflation epoch).

 

It depends on the interpretation of "measurement". Measurement can also exist in the abstract as "coordinates". But coordinates are measurements. Without coordinates time would not exist.
Time (Duration) is part of the ordering process, but it is not causal in and of itself, it is a result.

 

Just because we perceive it and can compare it to dimensions of our own hands (like a cubit) our arms (like a meter), or a distance we can run in minutes (a kilometer) does not mean that we understand the nature of it. Newton and Einstein were our greatest minds, and even their brainpower needed to assume it existed without explanation. But what Einstein discovered about the way relativistic lengths behave is at odds with our everyday experiences and common sense about such measurement. They do not behave anything like we are used to treating material solids, no matter how rigid any of those things may appear to beings locked in to a local state of motion that is closer to being at rest.

All of the information our senses process about the universe reduces to perceptions of length, every non self-referential definition in a dictionary of any human language as well. An apple, for example, is characterized by color (waveLENGTH), texture (contours on a smaller scale), weight, size, even the way it tastes or smells baked into a pie is related to molecular contours and dimensions as perceived by our specialized neurosensory apparatus. Comparative length is literally all we or our instruments ever sense or can know about the universe, yet we do not even really know what a length actually is. And neither did Euclid or Pythagorus.

Clear?

 

The dimension of length thus replaces for us what a binary representation of a number does for a digital computer.

Asking a computer or artificial intelligence based on binary processing the question "what is a number?" is exactly the same as asking a human being: "what is a length?" Our neurons deal with the concept from infancy. Small wonder it is taken for granted, we believe that we understand what it is. We do not.

 

Is that like the same as asking "How high is up"?

 

That's a question closely related to our conceptualization of infinity, BWS. Calculating 1/0 results in "not a number", or a halting problem for AI based on numbers. Calculating what an infinite length, like "how high is up?" yields no such difficulty to our minds. We understand, this simply means a length that is impossible for us to ever reach the end of. It does not remove it from the realm of lengths in general, so we have no difficulty encoding it in terms of neural pathways.

Great question, BWS. I think this is the first time anyone ever cared enough about the idea on any forum to ask the right question(s).

None of what I have written in the above paragraphs relating to dimensions and the limits of senses/instruments are original thoughts, and you may have already seen this mentioned by me in other threads here and elsewhere. The Greek philosopher Lucretius said it first, but couldn't take the idea any further than that, mainly because Euclid's work wasn't yet finished or appreciated, much less applied to a rudimentary understanding of what it would mean in terms of neurophysiology. Our senses are the result of a great deal of evolution applied to a refinement of neurosensory integration.

"If I have been able to see beyond the vistas glimpsed by those standing on the shoulders of giant monuments of Greek philosophers, Newton and others, it is because I first reduced the foundations and lower extremities of those monuments to rubble and restacked the pile higher than the tallest of them. A lot of effort, but well worth the scope of a fresh and unencumbered view." quote by danshawen 6/27/2015, copyright sciforums

 

Even an instrument equipped to accomplish an automated measurement cannot do so without a time lag. This would include even a measurement of time intervals using atomic clocks. Time is something that is essential and fundamental to the process of measurement or observing. You cannot separate the measurement from the time it takes to make it. Only entanglement is instant, and that is in part because it doesn't operate on the principle of a time interval. This also happens to be the reason you seem to think you can separate a measurement from the time it takes to make it. In principle at least, you can actually make such a measurement, but we're not there yet. You would need a quantum entanglement clock in order to accomplish such a measurement. This idea violates the uncertainty principle big time.

 

Complete nonsense with respect to science. The terminology you're using in this thread is complete nonsense. I knew you were going to measure stupid on my intellectual barometer before you wrote this post. You probably think that proves your knucklehead analysis in the last sentence of your post. I knew it for a period of time before you entered your post. This is how it's modeled

Motion [distance/tick]
dx/dt

Time [tick]
dt

Distance
dx

Empirical measurement and science go hand in hand.

 

I think I'll pour myself a drink.

 

This is the same conventional idea that RW has stated.

In calculus, dt = delta t = t2 - t1, not a "tick". A "tick" would be an instant, not an interval of time or a finite duration.

Even if it satisfies the calculus description of a limit, a "tick" cannot actually be done physically. A measurement done in an instant of time violates the uncertainty principle as well as robbing the thing that is moving of its momentum, energy and inertia. A measurement of anything does not happen in an instant.

 

So what?

 

So, to answer the question that was the original post, there is ample reason to differentiate time as something that may be part of a physical dimension. It is chiefly time's arrow which is most problematic in that regard.

The time interval that brucep used is a good example of how calculus can be used to provide memory of past states and thereby "cheat" time of its arrow, and I had not previously considered it in that way. Calculus shares this property with geometry, which was designed to be timeless from its inception. It is also an example of how time in some respects has the attribute of being a measurement that is relative in a half-duplex manner, like a meter stick that must be measured while in uniform motion. We must infer where the other end of the meter stick is from what we may know of its rest length, for we have not the ability to measure both ends in an instant while it is in motion with respect to us. The finite invariant speed of light prohibits this. In this way time, unlike a length, is by its nature assymmetrical.

The instant of 'now' is the same everywhere, but the rate at which time progresses is different, literally, everywhere.

That's all I have which relates to the topic of this thread.

 

You've earned it. Enjoy.

 

Yes, just like the spatial dimensions. Everyone measures a meter as a meter in the their own reference frame but the meter is different lengths when observed in another reference frame.

 

Danshawen would length not be equal to time since at a point of singularity time and space are both equal to zero as well as distance. Distance and length seem to be the same thing to me and also space, length or space is a nessasary prerequisite framework for time to exist.

 

I have an idea that only time and energy exist in this universe, but do not wish to derail a thread like this one that has played out to discuss it. This idea is not original with me either, evidently.

QQ and I had an intensive discussion of entanglement "spooky" thread going in pseudoscience, possibly the best place for it, if you wish to create one.

I get a lot of great new ideas from threads like this one with a more limited scope, and almost everyone contributes.

 

If energy existed before space as the singularity then energy would be the abosolute independant variable, then once time started so did space, so energy preceded time and space, and also because energy always existed, it was always non zero. On the other hand time and space are measurably to have had a beginning a zero point. If there was no work to do, a perspective of zero time, if energy existed then it would be infinite since none was used. but infinite energy cannot exist in space-time, in my opinion this is why there is a visible universe and the speculative dark matter around it.