Is time something that really exists?
- Thread starter Olga
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
There is a demigod called the Time Being. People often pray or make sacrifices or take actions for this demigod. They will say things like "I am giving up chocolate for the time being." If we ignore our duties for the time being, them it will make time disappear. Then it's just Monday. Nothing but Monday, generally around 1:20 PM, which can be pretty boring.
Wizard of Whatever
Registered Senior Member
Time never disappears. It has two aspects, change (difference) and duration (sameness). It was forever and will be forever.
Я хотела рассмотреть время с материальной стороны. Обычно его рассматривают в сцепке с движением. Ещё иногда с сознанием, как отношение положения объекта по отношению к его расположению в пространстве. Немного непонятно объясняю, я подумаю, как лучше сформулировать. Если коротко - как связано время, движение, и пространство?
More fake grievance based on stupid lies. Why are you still posting in Russian, don't you know the poll shows quite conclusively no one wants foreign languages written here? Yet, you persist in doing so, which shows how selfish you are. Funny how you keep wanting to show that to us over and over and over...
Many people learn about that in high school or early college. Funny, how you didn't learn that while demonizing the West for our lack of education.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
The jury is out on time. Whether it's a thing or not.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Is the jury also out on length, or rather, distance?
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Ok, let me clarify. Time works for everyday life and also for cutting edge physics research.Is the jury also out on length, or rather, distance?
What it actually is or if it is a thing at all is still a discussion. Is time quantised? Or rather is space time? If that question has been answered then I missed that meeting.
You must have encountered Boltzmann? Why the arrow of time does what it does? Not because there is a arrow necessarily but because of all the potential states/ micro states?
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
And don't worry I've not gone rogue. Length, width and height are fine, so is time.Is the jury also out on length, or rather, distance?
We know these things are malleable however if you start comparing a frame here with a frame over there.
I'm not sure if Einstein went with Block Universe, that always seemed odd to me.
You know about GR and QM and how time is involved or not.
Everything disappears after death.
- Erwin Schrödinger:: "But it [the universe] certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. --What is Life? Mind and Matter?
But one could alternatively propose that all those different states of the cosmos co-exist (in some manner), and the supposed "movement" through them (to still yield an illusion of change) is just a trick of cognition.
- Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this [4-dimensional] world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
Change is as independent of brain representations and psychological judgments as the foul odor of feces or the flat appearance of the Earth (when standing on it) or the green phenomenal attribute of grass. If you believe those appearances and feelings exist without a brain or equivalent apparatus -- exist external to the organ, then so does change. One universal state of the world being constantly replaced by a new one, and who cares about what is regulating that process to ensure coherence from one expunged "now" (state) to the next generated one. (It's magic, or some nomological realm of immaterial principles doing it, or the gosh dern prior-in-rank level making the simulation possible.)
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exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Well that's a bit different surely, to do with the singular direction of time, isn't it? But I'm not aware that time as a dimension is any more in question than distance. Whether these dimensions are granular or smooth is another issue again, it seems to me, which doesn't call into question the fact of them being, er, dimensions.
Whether a dimension has"existence" in the abstract, i.e. not attached to a measurement, is something one could debate I suppose.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
I am wading out into philosophy here I think. Not my swamp.
All I am saying is that time works but may not be a thing. An actual substance, just an arbitrary emergent property.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Only reading Penrose and Smolin. I was fine with time actually till then.
Well, before Einstein that is.
The speed of light, which is actually the speed of causality is the direct result of space and time being things, which are ultimately two sides to the same coin that make up our reality in a four dimensional metric. It works in such a way that you can place time and space on an x/y graph to show how we move through it such that the more we move through space, the less we move through time and vice versa.
Roosters for ever
Registered Senior Member
Time is a recognised dimension, just as length, breadth and height are dimensions. Just because they are not physical, does not make them any less real. They are real concepts. Concepts that can be slowed, by gravitational sources, and used in relaying general relativity maths to gps satellites that in turn are needed for accurate results of our earth based gps receivers.
Смотрите что получается по Эйнштейну, Пин: каждый объект двигается в пространстве относительно других объектов. Двигается с разной скоростью. Фотон двигается с максимально возможной скоростью(повторяю, это по Эйнштейну), следовательно, для любого объекта, двигающегося со скоростью фотона, время исчезает, потому что исчезает разница, они относительно друг друга уже не двигаются. Далее, возьмём фотон за точку отсчёта, и получаем, что относительно нас фотон находится в будущем, а мы относительно фотона - в прошлом. Но мы состоим в том числе из фотонов, атомы нашего тела. Мозг излучает фотоны постоянно в виде слабых электрических импульсов. Наши мысли находятся в будущем в таком случае? А память в прошлом... как это вообще работает? Ну, я имею ввиду сознание. Или, скорее, мысли-фотоны - это наше настоящее, наша точка отсчёта, а всё остальное - это прошлое. Мы как бы живём и в настоящем, и в прошлом. На этом и основана работа сознания. На вот этой разнице. Поэтому и будущее не видим, а прошлое помним. Потому что фотон имеет предел. Немного сложно, наверное объяснила.
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This might well be only a subjective truth. i.e. we only think it has a singular direction because that is how we experience it, not because that is how reality is. There is the notion of block-time, and a few ideas around that, such as Eternalism, that says the universe is a 4d block of spacetime, with all events (past, present, future) existing equally. The "arrow of time" is then just our experience, possibly due to entropy in some manner. There are other block-time ideas, like Presentism (only the present exists).
So sayeth the preacher, with nothing but confidence to support his belief.
There are some theories of time that would have it that if there is no change then there is no time. I.e. time is not a thing on its own but a way of ordering things, from A to B to C. It is to be found in, or even is, the process of change. If absolutely nothing changes (no motion, events, thoughts etc) then there is no time. This is something that goes back all the way to Aristotle, but found a notable voice with Leibniz. After all, if the universe froze, and then restarted, would we know? Could we know? Would any "passage of time" be recognised?
The idea that time is a thing in and of itself, that can exist, say, without change, is what the likes of Newton believed (although he also held that time flowed uniformly, which we now know to not be the case).
What "time" is will forever be debated, along with many other metaphysical and philosophical matters. People who confidently claim to know, who confidently assert their metaphysical idea as "the way it is", for example, are fooling noone with their lack of wisdom.