We should discuss "interesting" things again. There used to be more of such threads, and since posting is decreasing day by day, one can only hope that creating new topics that can give rise to debates would increase posting, no matter how minutely. Here's my take on it all..
Time, to me at least, is merely an illusionary construct, either physical or metaphysical, allowing us observation within a reference frame. No matter the mechanism of time, whether it be a dimension, an effect of space being warped by the mass of our planet, a construct of our minds, a measurement of entropy, a few lines of code on God's computer, a figment of our imagination or something else entirely, it is liner simply because it only allows for the progression from point a to point b. That's not to say time cannot by circumvented, or from the reference frame of an individual or object, be either parallel or divergent to another individual or object or even that point a and point b cannot be reversed; but time, in your reference frame, is always liner simply because time itself is not universal in scope. We all experience time in similar yet unique ways.
In the universal scheme of things, there is no need for a set-in-stone device to measure the difference between the past, present and future. That is to say, if something is going to happen then it already has and since we know the past has happened and are experiencing what we perceive to be the present, there is no inherit distinction between the three, just the perceived progression from one to the other. If you wanted to travel into the future, for instance, you could hop into your little space ship, fly away from earth at 99.9% of C for 6 months, return at the same speed, and you would find that for the one year that passed on board your spaceship, approximately 1,425 years had passed here on Earth. Time itself didn't change, you are in every sense, only one year older, yet you would have been born more than 1,426 years prior to your return, as viewed from the reference frame of the inhabitants of Earth. That being said, time cannot exist as a singular instance; a universal clock, if you will; it must be an entirely subjective and ever changing experience.
Time is relative to an origin. It's a measurement, and nothing more, to quantify a sequence of events, and to study the intervals between them.
That being said, Time exists parallel to Space, just like Length exists parallel to Plane (the second dimension). The Special Theory of Relativity, which touches on relative Time, exists within inertial frames of reference, meaning that the theory refers to time homogeneously as well as space homogeneously.
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Because time is perceived I believe that it can be manipulated in a way. Whether that is tangible manipulation based on the theory that time is flexible within our "dimension" or that it exists in the reality of our minds and it is able to be manipulated within ourselves. By this I mean that we may have the ability to change our perception of time based on the moment we are viewing. Instead of moving in a linear direction as we do, perhaps we hold the ability somewhere in our minds to view any moment that exists. This would seem to demonstrate that time is a circle and not a line. That obviously raises a lot of questions, but I feel the majority of the question that we have on time and space comes from how we use numbers. Specifically the idea of infinity. If we view the value of infinity and use it as a definite point (because it is a value) then there is no such thing as a line really, in terms of numbers anyways, but only a circle that never ends. Odd. This idea applied to space and time, and if time is cyclical or linear specifically, it may be that it is both. This in conclusion may demonstrate that we are yet to use the full capability of our minds or that our number system which actually exists only in our minds is a paradox and thus everything that we base off of it or is influenced by it (logic, reason, science) all are untrue in some ways and it is the reason that we have so many things misunderstood or unknown. But that is just what I thought of off the top of my head.
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"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."
Well, time could be viewed as linear in the same way that a train's journey is linear, if you think it just exists on a circle. Linear can also mean it only goes in one direction. It could still be linear within the context of a circle; however, since no matter how high you count, you never reach the same point again, I don't think it's a *perfect* solution.
Also, I don't believe time is directly correlated with any happenstance; it acts completely separate of it. A ruler doesn't specify that only the fuzzy end of a slice of pear can be at 4.37 inches, and a clock can't specify that only Julia can be at Fairfax at 12:38 PM. It's just a measurement that we put alongside events that is pristinely unaffected by the events, themselves. (Given, how we measure things change over time, and when such change occurs, measurements are just converted.) So, going "into the future" is impossible, in my opinion, using a scale of time, since time, by its own admittance, requires that mankind recorded events at such injunctions as we'd wish to arrive at.
Exactly! (By the way, funny you mention Fairfax, that's where I currently reside, but my name isn't Julia XD)
Essentially, we perceive Time as a unit of measurement from two static points, just like we perceive inches as a unit of measurement from two distinguishable points.
That being said, the only possible "hint" we have at time travel is the existence of Tachyons, which are still not completely proven. These sub-atomic particles have "appeared" in several atomic collision experiments, and disappeared as quickly as they came. They see it as an "echo" from the future collision... but still haven't been able to totally prove // replicate that consistently.
Either way, that phenomena is still unexplainable (I personally think it's indicative of the Super String Theory, but that's just me).
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Personally, I think time is linear, but I'm gonna throw some ideas around that claim otherwise.
Supposedly, our whole universe was created from a point of matter/energy. Being a point without volume, it had infinite density. Suddenly, for unknown reasons, the point exploded (what we know as Big Bang) generating all there is by transforming energy into mass (E=mc2). Assuming this is correct, there are 2 possible outcomes for the universe, but I'm going to focus on one. According to Wikipedia, one of them is that the universe, due to the (relatively weak) gravitational force, will stop expanding at a certain time, and start squezzing together again. This phenomenon is known as the Big Crunch, and the end result is that all mass will attract eachother so much, and so much more strongly as time passes, that it will "crunch" back into a point again, leaving us back where we started. Then for the same unknown reasons as the previous time, it would explode again, and if you think about it, why would different things happen? It's the same mass and the same explosion, after all. Perhaps time is a neverending cycle, begining and ending at the pre-Big Bang state of the universe, making time a circle, or closed shape.
Of course, this is more speculation than anything else, but it's fun to think about.
Great topic, I love physics, if you can call this that
Time is just a human concept developed by the brain to organize the events it has experienced for easy retrieval. It helps us relate events to others and allows us to identify with our own memories.
Time is only as "real" as a dream or an idea. Creatures without a brain and/or without capacity for memory do not experience time. While they still experience events, time simply does not occur for them because they are incapable of separating one event from another. They function without the necessity of organizing their lives linearly. We simply have developed to function differently.
Time is a concept and, as a concept, is not "real" in the true sense of the word. Just because a concept is widely accepted does not mean that it is true or real.
Think about it like this: When you wake up after a night of sleep and do not remember dreaming, does it not seem as if no time has passed at all? Without events to process, the brain is incapable of 'creating' the concept of time.
This also explains why some people can seemingly experience time at a different rate than others. When you're bored, does time not seem to drag slower than when you are busy? While a clock may tell you only a certain amount of time has passed according to the general human consensus, to you it felt like a much longer period.
I prefer to look at time as a series of events connected as an ever-expanding memory web, rather than a line. Think of it like a 3-D web diagram. Since time is totally based on human perception, one can 'jump' from place to place in the web, choosing to re-live / remember events that may not have any direct connection to a specific other event. So, say:
- At one point in my life I was given a collectible action figure as a gift
- At another point in my life I bumped my knee on a table
- Both events have now passed and are not directly related
However, I can remember both of them and, in a way, my mind is travelling 'back' to those events to recall them. In this sense I am travelling through time (since time is merely my organization of events).
The web gets more confusing though, when you realize it includes fallacies: events I PLAN to do but have not yet done and events I THINK I have done but have not actually. Say:
- I plan to go to the movies later tonight. It is in my time web. I can travel there and imagine what the event will be like, but it has not happened. (Keep in mind that the way I imagine it may not be the way it turns out and/or I may have several different ideas of how it may go. Both scenarios add additional points to the web).
- I distinctly remember putting my keys in my pocket yet, when I step out the front door, they are still inside. (These are also two distinct web events. The expected "I put my keys in my pocket" and the subsequent realization "I did not put my keys in my pocket". Both are events in my time-web that my brain can recall).
What the brain does is link all these experiences together in a number of ways.
- It connects experiences by the order in which I perceived them. This is typically defined as "time". However, I think that "time" should apply to all perceived events including those that have not occurred yet and/or did not occur as I expected.
- It also connects experiences in other ways (such as relevance to one another; sorting all horse-related memories together, or by negativity and positivity; good memories from bad, etc).
For these reasons I believe time cannot be treated as a linear concept, nor do I wholly approve of the word "real" to describe it. I also believe it is possible to travel through time and create your own future/past.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions that have little or no actual proof to back them up.
But for time to have a function it should only be used to tie together events that happened on a definitive point in time.
But that is the same function I attributed to time. The only difference is that I said I believe time can link to numerous points in a web rather than traveling from one to the next event along a line.
Impossible with memories since they always exist now, but totally possible if we use an independent measuring tool: The Clock! But the clock can't measure memories either, only real events, and that is how we get time. What we can do is link our memories to real events in time as defined by the clock.
One cannot truly 'measure' time because it is not a physical phenomenon. The best we can do is assert that clocks act as a tool to measure the generalized human consensus of how much "time" has passed. In reality though, clocks do not always measure the amount of perceived time that has passed for individuals. (You are in a test and feel like you've only been working on a problem for about four minutes. You look up at the clock and see that fifteen minutes have passed according to the general consensus).
We don't have to remember when the clock struck 12, but we can remember the date and the time 12, thereby assigning that memory to a definitive point in the time dimension.
Time has not been officially labelled a 'dimension'. It is a concept.
Basically, I think we agree on some key ideas: Time is not definite, different people's understanding and perception of time differs, a lot of disagreements we (and others) have about time are based in semantics.
A line is a dimension. Since my perception of time is a line I can refer to the line as a dimension.
Unfortunately, your perception of Time being a dimension is not correct. Length is a measurement in the first dimension using the Zero dimension as a reference (Points plotted to create a line). Area is a measurement in the second dimension using the first dimension as a reference (Lines plotted linearly to create a plane). Volume is a measurement in the third dimension using the second dimension as a reference (Planes plotted to create Space). Time is a measurement in the fourth dimension using the third dimension as a reference (Space plotted to create what is sometimes called a "Tesseract").
To claim Time to be a dimension is to claim that area is a dimension, which is inaccurate, as area is a measurement for the "movement" from the origin (line within the first dimension) to an end (line within the first dimension)
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Actually the clock doesn't measure anything, it can't since you can't measure something that doesn't exist, instead it defines. It has nothing to do with the real/not-real percieved time, but is actually based on something physical.
"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"
So, again, we're getting caught up in semantics. If you want to say it defines it rather than measures it, so be it. The point is that we use clocks to determine the general consensus on how much time has passed between and during events. This, I think, we both agree on.
A line is a dimension. Since my perception of time is a line I can refer to the line as a dimension.
True, but that doesn't mean that it is a dimension. I can refer to time as a type of donkey if I so choose (heck, I can even believe it) but that doesn't make it an accurate assertion. Now, obviously, the donkey idea is merely to highlight the problem of claiming that time is anything other than a concept (since that is all we can actually prove it is) and is much much much more ridiculous than postulating time as a dimension.
Again what it really boils down to is personal definition and semantics. Until science is able to accurately determine whether or not time 'exists' outside of our minds and, if so, what it is and how it works, we humans will continue to disagree about it.
So basically after plenty of discussion, we've come to the conclusion that:
- Time may be linear or it may not be
- Time may be a dimension or it may not be
- Human perception of time varies person to person and this is the most important factor in deciding what it is or is not
- Some people view it as being linear while others do not
- There is no valid way to measure time, seeing as how science has not even proven its existence (technically)
I completely understand why you say time is a dimension. I also have never said that time is not a dimension. I have only said that we do not know whether it is or is not one and that defining it as such is a personal choice (just as is my personal choice of saying it is not a dimension).
Until it is actually proven one way or the other, nobody can say for sure either way.
I think we've both agreed and disagreed where we will. I doubt we'll change our points of view either, until new evidence is presented to either support or disprove either side of the debate. Shall we come up with a new topic, then?
Time, to me at least, is merely an illusionary construct, either physical or metaphysical, allowing us observation within a reference frame. No matter the mechanism of time, whether it be a dimension, an effect of space being warped by the mass of our planet, a construct of our minds, a measurement of entropy, a few lines of code on God's computer, a figment of our imagination or something else entirely, it is liner simply because it only allows for the progression from point a to point b. That's not to say time cannot by circumvented, or from the reference frame of an individual or object, be either parallel or divergent to another individual or object or even that point a and point b cannot be reversed; but time, in your reference frame, is always liner simply because time itself is not universal in scope. We all experience time in similar yet unique ways.
In the universal scheme of things, there is no need for a set-in-stone device to measure the difference between the past, present and future. That is to say, if something is going to happen then it already has and since we know the past has happened and are experiencing what we perceive to be the present, there is no inherit distinction between the three, just the perceived progression from one to the other. If you wanted to travel into the future, for instance, you could hop into your little space ship, fly away from earth at 99.9% of C for 6 months, return at the same speed, and you would find that for the one year that passed on board your spaceship, approximately 1,425 years had passed here on Earth. Time itself didn't change, you are in every sense, only one year older, yet you would have been born more than 1,426 years prior to your return, as viewed from the reference frame of the inhabitants of Earth. That being said, time cannot exist as a singular instance; a universal clock, if you will; it must be an entirely subjective and ever changing experience.
Thoughts?
Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions
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Curse PremiumThat being said, Time exists parallel to Space, just like Length exists parallel to Plane (the second dimension). The Special Theory of Relativity, which touches on relative Time, exists within inertial frames of reference, meaning that the theory refers to time homogeneously as well as space homogeneously.
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I hope the next time you post on these forums, you actually make sense and not just post in some failure of an attempt to make a joke or whatever.
Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions
Also, I don't believe time is directly correlated with any happenstance; it acts completely separate of it. A ruler doesn't specify that only the fuzzy end of a slice of pear can be at 4.37 inches, and a clock can't specify that only Julia can be at Fairfax at 12:38 PM. It's just a measurement that we put alongside events that is pristinely unaffected by the events, themselves. (Given, how we measure things change over time, and when such change occurs, measurements are just converted.) So, going "into the future" is impossible, in my opinion, using a scale of time, since time, by its own admittance, requires that mankind recorded events at such injunctions as we'd wish to arrive at.
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Curse PremiumEssentially, we perceive Time as a unit of measurement from two static points, just like we perceive inches as a unit of measurement from two distinguishable points.
That being said, the only possible "hint" we have at time travel is the existence of Tachyons, which are still not completely proven. These sub-atomic particles have "appeared" in several atomic collision experiments, and disappeared as quickly as they came. They see it as an "echo" from the future collision... but still haven't been able to totally prove // replicate that consistently.
Either way, that phenomena is still unexplainable (I personally think it's indicative of the Super String Theory, but that's just me).
-------------------------------------------
Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.
-------------------------------------------
Supposedly, our whole universe was created from a point of matter/energy. Being a point without volume, it had infinite density. Suddenly, for unknown reasons, the point exploded (what we know as Big Bang) generating all there is by transforming energy into mass (E=mc2). Assuming this is correct, there are 2 possible outcomes for the universe, but I'm going to focus on one. According to Wikipedia, one of them is that the universe, due to the (relatively weak) gravitational force, will stop expanding at a certain time, and start squezzing together again. This phenomenon is known as the Big Crunch, and the end result is that all mass will attract eachother so much, and so much more strongly as time passes, that it will "crunch" back into a point again, leaving us back where we started. Then for the same unknown reasons as the previous time, it would explode again, and if you think about it, why would different things happen? It's the same mass and the same explosion, after all. Perhaps time is a neverending cycle, begining and ending at the pre-Big Bang state of the universe, making time a circle, or closed shape.
Of course, this is more speculation than anything else, but it's fun to think about.
Great topic, I love physics, if you can call this that
Time is a concept and, as a concept, is not "real" in the true sense of the word. Just because a concept is widely accepted does not mean that it is true or real.
Think about it like this: When you wake up after a night of sleep and do not remember dreaming, does it not seem as if no time has passed at all? Without events to process, the brain is incapable of 'creating' the concept of time.
This also explains why some people can seemingly experience time at a different rate than others. When you're bored, does time not seem to drag slower than when you are busy? While a clock may tell you only a certain amount of time has passed according to the general human consensus, to you it felt like a much longer period.
- At one point in my life I was given a collectible action figure as a gift
- At another point in my life I bumped my knee on a table
- Both events have now passed and are not directly related
However, I can remember both of them and, in a way, my mind is travelling 'back' to those events to recall them. In this sense I am travelling through time (since time is merely my organization of events).
The web gets more confusing though, when you realize it includes fallacies: events I PLAN to do but have not yet done and events I THINK I have done but have not actually. Say:
- I plan to go to the movies later tonight. It is in my time web. I can travel there and imagine what the event will be like, but it has not happened. (Keep in mind that the way I imagine it may not be the way it turns out and/or I may have several different ideas of how it may go. Both scenarios add additional points to the web).
- I distinctly remember putting my keys in my pocket yet, when I step out the front door, they are still inside. (These are also two distinct web events. The expected "I put my keys in my pocket" and the subsequent realization "I did not put my keys in my pocket". Both are events in my time-web that my brain can recall).
What the brain does is link all these experiences together in a number of ways.
- It connects experiences by the order in which I perceived them. This is typically defined as "time". However, I think that "time" should apply to all perceived events including those that have not occurred yet and/or did not occur as I expected.
- It also connects experiences in other ways (such as relevance to one another; sorting all horse-related memories together, or by negativity and positivity; good memories from bad, etc).
For these reasons I believe time cannot be treated as a linear concept, nor do I wholly approve of the word "real" to describe it. I also believe it is possible to travel through time and create your own future/past.
But that is the same function I attributed to time. The only difference is that I said I believe time can link to numerous points in a web rather than traveling from one to the next event along a line.
One cannot truly 'measure' time because it is not a physical phenomenon. The best we can do is assert that clocks act as a tool to measure the generalized human consensus of how much "time" has passed. In reality though, clocks do not always measure the amount of perceived time that has passed for individuals. (You are in a test and feel like you've only been working on a problem for about four minutes. You look up at the clock and see that fifteen minutes have passed according to the general consensus).
Time has not been officially labelled a 'dimension'. It is a concept.
Basically, I think we agree on some key ideas: Time is not definite, different people's understanding and perception of time differs, a lot of disagreements we (and others) have about time are based in semantics.
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Curse PremiumUnfortunately, your perception of Time being a dimension is not correct. Length is a measurement in the first dimension using the Zero dimension as a reference (Points plotted to create a line). Area is a measurement in the second dimension using the first dimension as a reference (Lines plotted linearly to create a plane). Volume is a measurement in the third dimension using the second dimension as a reference (Planes plotted to create Space). Time is a measurement in the fourth dimension using the third dimension as a reference (Space plotted to create what is sometimes called a "Tesseract").
To claim Time to be a dimension is to claim that area is a dimension, which is inaccurate, as area is a measurement for the "movement" from the origin (line within the first dimension) to an end (line within the first dimension)
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Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.
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So, again, we're getting caught up in semantics. If you want to say it defines it rather than measures it, so be it. The point is that we use clocks to determine the general consensus on how much time has passed between and during events. This, I think, we both agree on.
True, but that doesn't mean that it is a dimension. I can refer to time as a type of donkey if I so choose (heck, I can even believe it) but that doesn't make it an accurate assertion. Now, obviously, the donkey idea is merely to highlight the problem of claiming that time is anything other than a concept (since that is all we can actually prove it is) and is much much much more ridiculous than postulating time as a dimension.
Again what it really boils down to is personal definition and semantics. Until science is able to accurately determine whether or not time 'exists' outside of our minds and, if so, what it is and how it works, we humans will continue to disagree about it.
So basically after plenty of discussion, we've come to the conclusion that:
- Time may be linear or it may not be
- Time may be a dimension or it may not be
- Human perception of time varies person to person and this is the most important factor in deciding what it is or is not
- Some people view it as being linear while others do not
- There is no valid way to measure time, seeing as how science has not even proven its existence (technically)
Until it is actually proven one way or the other, nobody can say for sure either way.
My computer could be a donkey. But it probably isn't and there's little to no actual evidence to say that it is.
Haven't we already had this discussion? We're going in circles.
Herein you'll discover more secrets to the time enigma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6LkdL8THFo&feature=player_embedded
EDIT: Embed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts&feature=related