Time Is Dead

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by stateofmind, Jan 31, 2014.

  1. stateofmind seeker of lies Valued Senior Member

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    Axiom 1:
    Reality changes continually as far as we can tell.​
    Axiom 2:
    Change exists.​

    Definitions:
    Interval - A more-or-less consistent period of change.
    Duration - A period of one or more intervals (or fractions of intervals)​
    .
    Example 1:
    The duration to boil that pot of water from room temperature was 10.6 minute-intervals.​

    Example 2:
    It took him 30 second-intervals to write a single word. So his 500 word response to that troll on Sciforums was a total duration of 15,000 second-intervals or 250 minute-intervals. I don’t think internet forums are for him.​

    Conclusion:
    There is no instance in the entire scientific writings of mankind where the word “time” cannot be replaced with an equivalent using these defined words. Therefore I have proven that the problem with understanding the concept of “time” has nothing to do with it’s nature, but the fact that it has been poorly defined and then used inconsistently with this poor definition.​
     
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2014
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  3. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Hmmmmm.......I disagree....
    I am going out to dinner in around about 6 hours time.
    My time will advance at 1 second/second until I reach that moment in time.
    In the time events in between, I must find the time to have a shit, a shave, a shower and shampoo, get dressed, give the Mrs the greater bulk of that time to also get dressed, showered and perfumed up.
     
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  5. ForrestDean Registered Senior Member

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    Yep. Well actually, reality doesn't change, only our perception of it. But yeah, neither "time" nor "space" or distance exists. Both are nothing more than a perception.
     
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  7. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    Your entire premise is false. Pretty much EVERYTHING is in a constant state of change and time/space are inseparable. They are known by the combination as "spacetime."
     
  8. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    Er, so if we replace a word with another word that means exactly the same thing, that makes it meaningless? No, I don't think so.
     
  9. ForrestDean Registered Senior Member

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  10. RJBeery Natural Philosopher Valued Senior Member

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    I agree with this but can you expand?
     
  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    If we had no space, everything would be clumped together....If we had no time, everything would happen together...If we had no reality, we/you wouldn't exist.
    Albert showed that neither time nor space was absolute, and are inexorably linked in what we call space/time.
    We, and all mass and energy, change the geometry of our own space/time, by the reality of existing.
     
  12. Motor Daddy Valued Senior Member

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    It's not possible to have no space. It's only possible to have infinite space. There is no concept of space that is less than infinite.
     
  13. eram Sciengineer Valued Senior Member

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    @forrest dean I believe time and space exist, for how can we humans perceive something that doesn't exist? (Without drugs of course)

    @stateofmind you claim to have solved a problem without stating what the problem is.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No, Time is still being published. It's Newsweek that's dead.

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  15. stateofmind seeker of lies Valued Senior Member

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    The main problem I find when thinking about the nature of "time" is the word "time" itself. It's used so loosely today with so many definitions that it can easily throw unnecessary hurdles in your investigation. I think it is much simpler, and a more direct question, to ask "What is the nature of change?". This is the heart of the "What is time?" question, and in my OP I did my best to prove that "time" is a subset of, and that it's whole meaning is dependent on, the greater category of "change".

    My 9th grade science class textbook was called "Change Over Time". When I look at this title now I think it's retarded. An equivalent title would be "Change Over Segments of Change". What does that even mean? That's just gibberish - and I've drank at least as much koolaide as you because I totally know what they mean by "change over time". It makes sense to us because we're all sharing the same insanity.

    "Change" doesn't actually require the baggage of a past or future. It could be argued that the effect of a "past" event on the present is simply just that same past event running the course of it's life, like an echo in a cave, by the imprint it leaves from its explosion, or in the neural web of our brains to create what we call a "memory". Looking at it from this perspective, intense life-events like the death of a loved one could almost be looked at as a sort of "pressure change" for our minds, analogous to the air-pressure waves we call "sound". An intense event (intensity... another name for amplitude) is just like a loud sound, and like loud sounds, they take longer to fade into silence, (or in our case, longer to fade from memory). Interestingly, one could almost look at the amount of people that experience an event as the amount of reverb that is applied to the event's amplitude, frequency and duration. If just a single person was present (or none), that would be a very "dry" environment and the event wouldn't sustain as long as if it were "broadcast" to a large crowd of people.

    This is all very interesting when we think about something like the internet, where any event today is capable of achieving a great amount of "wetness", and can be sustained theoretically indefinitely... it seems like we're approaching what would be the equivalent of a feedback loop. Honestly I can already see it with the acceleration of literally everything increasing year by year, day by day.. second by second...

    You can look at the "information" of a song and see the entire song, its theoretical waveform, but that is not the song itself, just like the past is not reality. The song, like reality, can only be experienced one moment at a time, there's literally no other way. So all the past can ever be is a symbolic representation of simplified 1's and 0's (which again must be put into sequence to be experienced), either courtesy of the neurons in our brain, or the recorder on your phone.

    The future. The future is all the echos of every different energy that has been stored in you from the entire universe, that moves you in the unique direction that is your life. And since we're such sophisticated beings, our brains are actually capable of creating possible scenarios for what will happen when that pent up energy gets released. This affords us the convenience of "choosing our mate" so to speak. A man doesn't give his seed to anything he doesn't find attractive, and likewise he seeks to give his pent-up reverberation the best echo possible.

    So the present is all there is of course, but our brains have invented the concepts of "past" and "future" to be used as tools to help accelerate our present moment to make the best "song" possible.
     
  16. Motor Daddy Valued Senior Member

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    Too funny!

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  17. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Circa 1950 I took a course in philosophy. There was a chapter in the text book relating to time which had a lot of verbiage, but seemed to say very little. Mathematics, physics, & sports were my forte, so I asked my father (an engineer with many other interests) about my problems with the text.

    He said that he remembered that some book by Einstein (or about him) had a pertinent paragraph relating to time. I found the book in the college library.

    This is approximately what Einstein wrote, which I think is very succinct and pretty much describes it.
    It is interesting that Albert used bold or italics for before & after, implying that they should be considered undefined primitive terms, not definable via the use of simpler terms or concepts.

    Note that an axiomatic system requires some undefined primitive terms to avoid various logical problems associated with circular definitions.

    It is interesting that Albert did not mention the concept of the flow of time from past through the present into the future, which does seem to be a construct (illusion?) of the human mind rather than an objective process associated with reality.

    When I showed the above to my philosophy professor, he said he would include the above in future lectures, provide it in a pamphlet, & tell students to ignore the chapter in the text book.
     
  18. ForrestDean Registered Senior Member

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  19. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    No, as far as we can tell change is a relative relationship between two of more parameters or states which may or may not occur in conjunction with a change in time. A gradient, for example, can describe change in a property or quality of some kind as a function of position in space. You seem to be struggling to define "the derivative, with respect to time" of anything else.
    That depends on what you mean by "exist". Most folks would probably say that change (the delta symbol) describes an operation on something that either exists, or else on the property, quality, dimension, parameter, etc., associated with an object, entity or agency that exists. That change operator may be strictly hypothetical, as in a computer simulation of metal fatigue, or it may be something surreal, such as getting flagged by a radar while speeding.


    Here you're searching for words like "period" or "wavelength". "Interval" applies to both periodic and aperiodic systems or phenomena. Thus, we can talk about the "interval" between hyperfine transitions in the time standard at Denver, which is the most consistent thing ever measured, or we can talk about the "interval" between arrival of cosmic rays, or of particle decay (of isotopes) which are among the most inconsistent of intervals ever measured. Besides, "interval" doesn't even have to relate to time, as we speak of pitch intervals in music (an octave for example).
    Duration can be the same as the delta operator, or we can think of it at the macro scale (not consigned to infinitesimals) merely as the difference between time values at any two arbitrary measurements.

    Here I would use the word "units".

    [
    There would be in all the math and science I can think of.


    The nature of time is embedded in the ways it's used in math and science, so this doesn't apply.
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2014
  20. stateofmind seeker of lies Valued Senior Member

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    I might see where you're going with this... if we're part of something that is all that is, and "nothing" is just an illusion we've imagined, then since there's no point of reference outside of ourselves (the totality that is reality) then it could be said that there's no change since, in that scenario, there are only discrete moments that are unique to themselves and since only one moment can occupy reality at a time, there's no way for a moment to observe another moment, ie. no point of reference and no change. It's like the example of a sphere moving in space... without something else contrasting that movement, there's no way to know that it's moving.

    The rest of your post is you being a fag-tard. You're making drama over me not using your pet word "units". I could have replaced "interval" with "chicken" and it wouldn't have made a difference to my purpose and argument with this thread - why? because I defined it. All words are variables dipshit. You would have been the first response to intelligently address my argument but you had to ruin it with your condescension. Get fucked.
     
  21. Secret Registered Senior Member

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    Actually how does something change (be it position, color, state, velocity, entropy etc.)?
    If there is no such thing as time, then how does change brought about?

    For example, in the gradient example you mentioned above, grad(F)=partial derivative (dF/dx_i), F changes for every infinitestimal change in dx_i, but how does dx_i change from one value to another?

    Something that really baffles me is e.g. when something is moving w.r.t. another thing, then has a velocity which is basically change in position w.r.t. time. How to give the same result if there is no such thing as time?

    Or more fundamentally, I think the key thing on the question on "What is Time" is "What is motion? What does it depends on?"

    https://www.google.com.hk/search?es...4.0....0...1c.1.32.serp..13.5.531.FkEDHsO37jI

    I cannot remember which issue of scientific american it is from, but it mentioned something like "The Earth revolves around the sun x times which is when the heart beats y times". Here this guy do away the notation of time by reducing it in such as way so that to tell "time" you compare something of A relative to B. but I think such approach completely missed the point about the issue of time

    So once again I think the key question to find out what the nature of time is is asking
    "What is motion?"

    As for the other users, I am sorry I cannot comment on them yet as I am still being mindscrewed by pretty much everything on this thread
     
  22. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The exceptions I noted didn't cover all of those. That's why I mentioned gradients.

    There is no restriction on precursors, if that's what you're getting at. An artist can spend hours perfecting a color wheel in oil paints, but once it dries, the change in brightness or hue as a function of position on the canvas will be immune to the passage of time. From another perspective, consider the arrival of the inverted image of that wheel onto a retina. All of the color information is processed in parallel, among millions of sense receptors. So the change in colors arrives "at the same time".


    There is a difference between saying two things are happening at the same time and "time does not exist".

    Since time is relative, and its scale is inversely proportional to the scale of space -- as relative velocity/gravity enters the picture -- we have to keep in mind that time and space are not independent, at least not in this sense. Thus I might try to define motion as "the quality which warps time and space between reference frames". I'm not sure if that was where you're heading or not.


    As strange as it sounds, my first impulse is to say motion is the quality that superimposes onto spacetime a copy of itself, warped, such that two reference frames diverge from a condition in which there was only one.
     
  23. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    You mean the universe? No one can say if there is more than this.

    "Nothing" can have different meanings. It used to mean "the vacuum of space" until recent discoveries found something called quantum fluctuations. It might still be used to describe the state of the universe "just before" the Big Bang.

    There are plenty of points of reference outside of ourselves. Some of them are really far away, like the quasars and objects with jets sending us their signals around the clock. All of the light in the night sky maps out an immense expanse of space.

    There might be some case for that but it wouldn't apply across the board. Otherwise you wouldn't notice cause and effect relationships. But the kind of change I was referring to is usually called a gradient. It simply means that something can change (like the depth of water as you go from the beach to where some point where you can't touch bottom) over distance, not time. Divers talk about a pressure gradient as they descend. Or a a temperature gradient. Those changes occur over distance instead of time.

    In the same inertial reference frame, maybe, but as soon as motion or gravity get involved, then that "same moment" gets split into two different reference frames, and the events they contain no longer happen at the same time.

    Here I'd have to guess that a photon landing on a target might count as such a case, depending on what you mean by this.

    There's always a point of reference. It's harder to imagine a case where there isn't. And while many things seem like they don't change over time (like the climate, or the evolution of species) they just change too slowly for one person to observe in a single lifetime.

    This relates to what we call Galilean Relativity. The guy on the ship doesn't know he's moving until he comes around to the other side and sees the dock moving away.

    I revised my post. Thanks for the compliment. No harm intended.
     

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