Random Thoughts on Time

murt

what time is it?

Naos

Originally posted by flogen

Therefore, as we cannot see the past

Flogen

We can see the past my ill-informed friend..
Ever look at a video tape? Ever listen to a cd?
Hey, while im at it, ill throw the BIG picture in.. Look up into the sky. See those stars? They too, are the past...

Naos

Originally posted by Kappar
Travel in time is possible. If one were to travel on a spaceship at high speed time would slow down for you. Upon returning to Earth for the sake of agrument say 1 year has past while for you only 6 months has gone that means you have trveled in time.

This could be appleied on a miniture scale on earth. Imagine someone on a tall building they are traveling faster then someone at ground level because of the rotation of the earth. They are therefore making a tiny tiny time travel.

Yawn. Einsteins Nuclear clock.....

Fysh

Originally posted by Mear
We can see the past my ill-informed friend..
Ever look at a video tape? Ever listen to a cd?
Hey, while im at it, ill throw the BIG picture in.. Look up into the sky. See those stars? They too, are the past...

I think flogen was trying to question our acceptance of our memory as being accurate (the idea about how the entire universe could have been put together five minutes ago and everyone has just been tricked into "remembering" an entirely fictional history). That's how I interpreted his post, anyway.

Regarding seeing the past, however - we can see it, but only if someone or something has a record of it. Much more is lost, however, than we can ever record to store.

40crush41

Originally posted by flogen
The idea of the past is something that people always assosiate with years gone by, but what about seconds?? I suddenly started to think deeply about the past, and how this second instantly becomes the past.
Therefore, as we cannot see the past (when we look behind us while walking down the road), then where is it? Does every moment suddenly cease to exist, or, as i believe, does it 'drop off' underneath this time frame into another??

i thought i was the only crazy one -yea, that thought bugs the _ out of me. what happens to all those little seconds- like after i drop a glass of milk or something i start thinking to myself -well, what if i held that glass for that tiny second and then it wouldn't have happened at all, and how im spending so many of these little seconds typing up this response while i should be sleeping.. hmm, maybe i just think too much.

hmm... time, such a curious thing- one shouldn't think about it too much though, can drive u a little looney!

Georgiana

I think I agree with Fysh. Perception of time and substantive issues about time are two separate questions. But on the other hand-if there were no humans to perceive time- would there be time? This is something of an imponderable question. Its like the tree falling in the forest question.

Secondly, the issue of space is a parallel issue to the issue of time.

Both questions are raised in the context of human existence because we who are engaging with this are locked within human existence, which is a phenomenon and life which is a phenomenon and matter which is a phenomenon.

If you reduce everything down to elements then time and space hardly matter. They are just descriptions of energy movements. In the end its a question of energy and elements. Matter and life are manifestations in various forms.

PS Im a bit drunk!

Trip

Originally posted by simu
I was saying that if there were other conscious species who had evolved on other planets, they might experience time quite differently than we do but still come up with a concept like entropy if they began to study the universe.

Yes if there was life on a different planet than time would be totally different for them as the closer or farther away you are from the sun the shorter or longer your day/year is , this is due to how long it takes to rotate around the sun.


You say time only exists because you let it ? Than maybe you exist because i let you ! but in reality time would have to exist and our proof of this is ageing and how our bodies age but than we might have a weird take on time maybe as we get older we are actually gettin younger

Fysh

Originally posted by Trip
Yes if there was life on a different planet than time would be totally different for them as the closer or farther away you are from the sun the shorter or longer your day/year is , this is due to how long it takes to rotate around the sun.

Er, the concept of days, weeks and years is *defined* in terms of solar rotation. Obviously the time taken for planets at different distances from the sun to complete a rotation will be different. That doesnt conclusively mean that species evolving on that planet will evolve with an entire biocycle with a timecycle directly scaled up from our own.

To give an example, pluto is supposed to take something like two hundred and twenty five years (using the human convention of one year) per solar rotation. So a pluto "day" is two hundred odd of our years. That doesn't mean that pluto's inhabitants, if there are/were any, would have a second defined as being 82125 "earth" seconds. They might *perceive* time in such a way, but that's a different matter, as I have already pointed out. The entire point is that the concept of time is derived from observing the universe, and therefore the units used may differ, but if the theories and models accurately represent the universe then their predictions will be equal. In the same way as different temperature scales have different values for physical states such as the boiling point of water - these scales can be interconverted, so long as both scales accurately model temperatures that can be measured.

Fysh

Originally posted by Georgiana
I think I agree with Fysh. Perception of time and substantive issues about time are two separate questions. But on the other hand-if there were no humans to perceive time- would there be time? This is something of an imponderable question. Its like the tree falling in the forest question.

I've already stated that, as far as science is concerned, there would be. Time as we understand it seems to be inextricably linked to the physical processes that occur within our universe - as long as there is any kind of physical process occuring, there will be time.

(blatantly offtopic, but since the tree-falling-in-woods thing came up:

according to classical physics, the tree would make soundwaves when it fell. According to quantum, the entire spectacle would only have relevance if it were observed. However, quantum is entirely silent on the topic of whether observations made by squirrels who've just noticed their house moving downwards at speed count, in this context)

If the universe were to reach its maximum entropy (most stable state, where no more processes or reactions are energetically feasible beyond the quantum level), then there would largely be no useful interpretation of time. This might get rid of it as a useful concept, although I'm unsure if it would mean that there was no time....

SkepticOne

Off topic tree falling in forrest question.

We don't really have the equivalent of the word sound for visual experiences. ''Light' might be the equivalent to a scientist, but 'Spectacle' or 'sight' might be the nearest equivalent in everyday usage and these have a very obvious subjective meaning. We don't really have a sense of perplexity if someone were to ask whether a tree falling in a forest makes a spectacle when there's no one there. People would simply say the question doesn't make sense.

However, the word 'sound' does seem to have this dual meaning, hence the mild perplexity people feel when asked the question. We use the word sound to mean both mechanical vibrations in air and also the the thing that is experienced.

Sorry, back on topic. With regard to perception of time, I would think most higher animals have the ability percieve events according to the order in which they occur in time. Humans certainly have no problem identifying which of two events came first. They also have no problem distinguishing between short intervals between events or long intervals. There are obvious evolutionary advantages to this and we certainly have the neural hardware to handle it. It seems only natural that we would then develop words for "long time" and "short time" etc. Yes, these are relative terms. As has been pointed out, we don't directly percieve 'absolute' time. But then again, we don't percieve absolute space either. We can't percieve directly a yard, except with reference to some other object (e.g. a yardstick).

If the existence of time is regarded as a philosophical problem, then the existence of space is much the same, imo. They are probably just aspects of the same problem, namely the existence of the world in general.

Trip

Originally posted by SkepticOne

If the existance of time is regarded as a philosophical problem, then the existance of space is much the same, imo. They are probably just aspects of the same problem, namely the existance of the world in general.

I couldn't agree more with you .ww)
But than i think they both aren't just aspects of the same problem but that they are the same problem. Correct me if i'm wrong but we judge time by space ( how we rotate the sun ) ? so couldn't that mean that our solar system rotates around another one , which in turn another planet's inhabitants (if there is any) could have the same time sequence as us , so to them time would exist in the exact same way to them ?

Georgiana

Fysh and Others

You must be very young and eat a lot of "fysh" brainfood to produce such clever posts. My own synaptic connections can hardly cope with it. But the following statement by Fysh seems to get to the heart of the matter.


"If the universe were to reach its maximum entropy (most stable state, where no more processes or reactions are energetically feasible beyond the quantum level), then there would largely be no useful interpretation of time. "
(dont know how to use the quote feature properly)

When you ponder this issue you start to get into the really big question of "what is existence". The issue of existence and the issues of time and space seem to me to be inextricably interlinked. The issues of time and space seem to lead to the question of the difference between existence and non existence. The absence of time and space would seem to signify the absence of existence since existence is contingent upon time and space. Everything has to exist sometime somewhere unless it is at the point of maximum entropy which would seem to be actually non existence???

beer enigma

But just supposing for a minute that we were already dead, or had moved onto another life - re-incarnation. The life you are experiencing through memory now 'could' be just a memory of a previous life, while the body is recording new experiences and images...

Could explain, deja-vu, re-incarnation, even promonition.......

Fysh

Originally posted by Andip
But just supposing for a minute that we were already dead, or had moved onto another life - re-incarnation. The life you are experiencing through memory now 'could' be just a memory of a previous life, while the body is recording new experiences and images...

Could explain, deja-vu, re-incarnation, even promonition.......

Suppose I'm just a sentient banana with delusions that I'm in fact a human being?
Your question simply highlights the mind-body problem - there *was* a thread about it, but it seems to have fallen down the list....have a look for it, you'd find it interesting reading, I think.

Although I'm not sure how your post has anything to do with the discussion on time and space....

Regarding Trip's comment about measuring time using space - I agree. Time and space are inextricably linked, meaning that no objective truth about one can be found without some sort of analysis of the other.

Georgiana

I was reflecting on the bus today that if you wanted to meet someone but did not want to meet them in time or space, how would you do it? Could it be done? In our general understanding of science, unless you want to get into the paranormal, the answer is no. The meeting could not occur. This seems to offer some evidence that something cannot exist unless it is located in time and space.

lisa.c

time is precious to me wether it exsists or not. time is what we have with our loved ones and that time can be taken at any time. every second i have with my son is precious and those seconds i never want taken. so for me my thoughts on time are to take each one embrace it ,remember every good time and forget the bad as you lose precious time thinking about them all.

Georgiana

Lisa

I couldnt agree more. Everything else is a lot of old waffle because there are no answers to these questions.

DadaKopf

How do you know?

Georgiana

Alright Dada - to be more accurate- it is a load of waffle in my humble opinion - which is all there is on this subject- opinion- because the facts are unknown to humankind- but as loads of waffle go- its an interesting load of waffle ...to pass the time- if there is time that is....

LethargicPawn

i couldn't find a suitable thread to post this in. however it could have been mentioned here before, so if so, just ignore it. nevertheless, when i saw the word "random" i recalled something i had thought of before

can there be such a thing as random? for surely, if the exact conditions of an event were recreated, then the outcome would be the same.. certainly in every context that i can think of. in the case of the event involving free will (for example a person making a seemingly random decision) there are always insignificant factors influencing the decision-maker in a small way. in a case where it does not involve free will, it is merely a physical event, that is determined by the various physical laws of the universe, etc

what i'm basically saying is that, if conditions surrounding any given event were recreated, and the outcome were identical, doesn't this indicate that there was nothing random about the event? can anyone give an example of an occurence which, if perfectly recreated, would have multiple possible outcomes?

this seems to me to be coherent and logical argument, so if anyone has any thoughts, i'd appreciate any input. a suggestion made to me is that the word "random" refers to events witnessed subjectively.. can it be discussed in the sense i mean it? also, the word random could have a specific meaning in time, in that the word random can be applied to present/future events but not past occurences. however, both solutions appear to me to be dodging the issue of whether, in essence, everything can be predicted (in the sense that free will is not quite free)

SkepticOne

Originally posted by LethargicPawn
i couldn't find a suitable thread to post this in. however it could have been mentioned here before, so if so, just ignore it. nevertheless, when i saw the word "random" i recalled something i had thought of before

can there be such a thing as random? for surely, if the exact conditions of an event were recreated, then the outcome would be the same.

Apparently at the quantum level there are genuinely random events, for example the emission of a particle from a radioactive material can't be predicted according to any known theory and therefore must be considered random.

Trip

Well tbh lisa i think what is true but a pile load of bull****e imho that is a load of waffle going on about time being precious ... Time imo that we have no control over whatsoever and it runs on a sort of parrallel line to us as in we cannot see time but we know it's there

popinfresh

Time is a human inverntion used to measure the momentum and energetic activity caused by the knock on effect which was the big-bang. Here's some food for thought, If you could somehow find a way to manipulate the rate at which the forces of the universe act, could you then manipulate time. But more importantly is it possible to manipulate the mathematics of the universe given that we can only interact or control products of the universes contents

mada999

Does running in the rain get you wetter than walking ?

just a thought

Trip

mada999 wrote:

Does running in the rain get you wetter than walking ?

just a thought

hahahah .
actually i've looked into this if it's raining badly out you get wetter by walking but if it's a light shower u get wetter running has something to do with the distance and the amount/speed of the downpour

munkeehaven

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the work of attrition of that adaptation to which people must resign themselves so long as they fail to change the world. Age is a role, an acceleration of "lived" time on the plane of appearances, an attachment to things.

read this short munch on time, its very interesting....http://deoxy.org/timefascination.htm

osmethod

Time: All I know is that every day I get older untill the day I'll eventually die.

The duration of those years tom anyway is a valid time concept.

Time: Because I get older and no matter what I do I cannot get younger

This implies a direction in my concept of time

osmethod

JohnnyBravo

popinfresh wrote:

Time is a human inverntion used to measure the momentum and energetic activity caused by the knock on effect which was the big-bang. Here's some food for thought, If you could somehow find a way to manipulate the rate at which the forces of the universe act, could you then manipulate time. But more importantly is it possible to manipulate the mathematics of the universe given that we can only interact or control products of the universes contents

It would allow us to predict the future

Piste

Ok I haven't really been reading this tread so I dunno if this is relavant or not but I have this little theory why time travel would never work

1) If time travel was possible we would be seeing people who have come from the future to the present. The present situation on the world is in such disarray that now would be an Ideal time to travel to.

2)People haven't travelled through time to here yet so therefore in the future, scientists will never come up with time-travel

Feel free to rip my theory to shreds, after all I am but a humble teenager who's arguments lend to be flawed