Does time exist?

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience' started by Asexperia, Sep 28, 2015.

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  1. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Is length a thing, too?
     
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  3. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    It needs reason
     
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  5. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry, I had forgotten what you were like. Forget it: there are already enough eels in my hovercraft.
     
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  7. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    The following article with some videos from various professionals on the nature of time.....

    The article also comprises three interesting interviews with Max Tegmark, Andreas Albrecht and Huw Price......
     
    Last edited: Jan 13, 2017
  8. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    http://www.space.com/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html
    The Illusion of Time: What's Real?
    By Robert Lawrence Kuhn | July 6, 2015 04:27pm ET

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    Credit: Clock image via Shutterstock
    Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of "Closer To Truth," a public television and multimedia program featuring the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions regarding the cosmos, consciousness and a search for meaning. Kuhn is co-editor (with John Leslie) of The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? Kuhn contributed this article, based on two recent "Closer To Truth" episodes (produced/directed by Peter Getzels), to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

    Why is time controversial? It feels real, always there, inexorably moving forward. Time has flow, runs like a river. Time has direction, always advances. Time has order, one thing after another. Time has duration, a quantifiable period between events. Time has a privileged present, only now is real. Time seems to be the universal background through which all events proceed, such that order can be sequenced and durations measured.

    The question is whether these features are actual realities of the physical world or artificial constructs of human mentality. Time may not be what time seems — this smooth unity without parts, the ever-existing stage on which all happenings happen.


    Is time physical?
    To appreciate time is to feel the fabric of reality. I interview physicists and philosophers on my public television series, "Closer to Truth," and many assert that time is an illusion. What do they mean that time is "not real?"

    Huw Price, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, claims that the three basic properties of time come not from the physical world but from our mental states: A present moment that is special; some kind of flow or passage; and an absolute direction.

    "What physics gives us," Price said, "is the so-called 'block universe,' where time is just part of a four-dimensional space-time … and space-time itself is not fundamental but emerges out of some deeper structure."

    We sense an "arrow" or direction of time, and even of causation, he said, because our minds add a "subjective ingredient" to reality, "so that we are projecting onto the world the temporal perspective that we have as agents [in this environment]." [Alan Alda Asks: 'What Is Time?']

    Think of the block universe, which is supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, as a four-dimensional space-time structure where time is like space, in that every event has its own coordinates, or address, in space-time. Time is tenseless, all points equally "real," so that future and past are no less real than the present.

    Time is, was, will be?
    So, are we being misled by our human perspectives? Is our sense that time flows, or passes, and has a necessary direction, false? Are we giving false import to the present moment?

    "We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, "or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing; it's all just there — past, present, future.

    "So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD," he added; "there's nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there's all this drama unfolding in the movie. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing. But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories."

    "Time is out there," said Andreas Albrecht, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of California, Davis. "It's called an external parameter — the independent parameter in the [classic] equation of motion. So, time — the time we know since we learned to tell time on a clock — seems to disappear when you study physics, until you get to relativity.

    "The essence of relativity is that there is no absolute time, no absolute space. Everything is relative. When you try to discuss time in the context of the universe, you need the simple idea that you isolate part of the universe and call it your clock, and time evolution is only about the relationship between some parts of the universe and that thing you called your clock." [5 of the Most Precise Clocks Ever Made]

    Julian Barbour, a British physicist, describes time as "a succession of pictures, a succession of snapshots, changing continuously one into another. I'm looking at you; you're nodding your head. Without that change, we wouldn't have any notion of time."

    "Isaac Newton," Barbour noted, "insisted that even if absolutely nothing at all happened, time would be passing, and that I believe is completely wrong."

    To Barbour, change is real, but time is not. Time is only a reflection of change. From change, our brains construct a sense of time as if it were flowing. As he puts it, all the "evidence we have for time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear."

    It's not all illusory?
    But not all physicists are ready to demote time to second-class status.

    John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist and Anglican priest, believes that the flow and direction of time are real and relentless. It is a "mistaken argument," he said, to use relativity to assert that time is an illusion, "because no observer has knowledge of a distant event, or the simultaneity of different events, until they are unambiguously in that observer's past. And, therefore, that argument focuses on the way observers organize their description of the past and cannot establish the reality of the awaiting future."

    Polkinghorne rejects the notion of the static block universe of space and time together. "We live in a world of unfolding and becoming," he said.

    Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, said, "I have the distressing experience of physicists telling me that time is not real. … It confuses me, because time seems to be real. Things happen. When I clap my hands, it happened. … I would prefer to say that general relativity is not the final theory than to say that time does not exist."

    Time is a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics. To many physicists, while we experience time as psychologically real, time is not fundamentally real. At the deepest foundations of nature, time is not a primitive, irreducible element or concept required to construct reality.

    The idea that time is not real is counterintuitive. But many ideas about how the world works that humanity had taken for granted have required a complete rethink. As Tegmark puts it, "There've been so many things in physics that we thought were fundamental that turned out to be mere illusions, that we're questioning everything — even time."

    What reality is depends on what time is. Is time irreducible, fundamental, an ultimate descriptor of bedrock reality? Or is our subjective sense of flowing time, generated by our brains that evolved for other purposes, an illusion?

    Opinion is divided, but many physicists and philosophers now suspect that time is not fundamental; rather, time emerges out of something more fundamental — something nontemporal, something altogether different (perhaps something discreet, quantized, not continuous, smooth).

    The alternative, of course, is our common intuition: time does flow, the present is superspecial as the only real moment, and the deep nature of reality is one of becoming.

    I cannot decide.
     
  9. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes that's it exactly, thanks.

    The second idea is that time is our coordinate for determining the order of change, i.e. cause and effect, just as length determines order from left to right. But I think these GR specialists make too much of trying to tell the rest of us that our way of looking at time is - somehow - objectively wrong. Just as they make too much, sometimes, of trying to tell us that the force of gravity isn't really there.

    As usual it's a question - I think - of using the model appropriate to the task at hand and not making claims about ultimate reality. For most of us a model in which time passes is fine, just as most of us find gravitational force easier to work with than spacetime curvature and tensors.
     
  10. river

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    Hmmm....

    None have addressed the essence of time .
     
  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    The professionals in the link/s certainly have, and in the mean time you carry on with the usual pretentious nonsense.

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  12. river

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    No they haven't
     
  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Of course they have.
    Pretending something hasn't been said that is obviously said, and linked, is totally stupid river.

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    And of course you have been given a forced holiday before because of that rather childish habit.

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  14. river

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    How has the the essence of time been addressed .
     
  15. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Michael 345 likes this.
  17. river

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  18. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Thought I would come back to this debate with a new thought bubble.

    To save going back to previous post in summary my thoughts are
    • Time does not exist except as a concept and is not fundamental
    • Time does not flow nor is there an arrow of time
    • The past does not exist
    • The future does not exist
    • Only now exist and it does not have any thickness ie it has no time measurement
    • Time in the conventional way of thought is a measurement of change
    • Time is often confused with age
    Our current understanding of the Universe is that it is about 14 billion years old

    This is deduced from observations of the most distant objects we can see

    The observations also indicate the Universe began with a Big Bang (or Rapid Expansion if you are so inclined)

    We have no knowledge of the current status of the most distant objects or if they are still in existence since our perspective of them is 14 billion years old

    However during all that 14 billion years only NOW existed

    To explain that thought we should postulate a being (observer) outside of our Universe and far enough away to have all of the Universe in view at all times

    Having noticed the Big Bang the observer regularly returns his gaze in the direction of our Universe and notices the expansion

    Since he has ALL of the Universe in view everything for him in our Universe is happening at the same time NOW

    There is no sense of time seperation of our Earth being 14 billion years from the edge of our Universe

    I don't think I have expressed the thought bubble in the most clearest mode but I hope I have imparted the gist of the idea

    Humpty Dumpty is back
    Poe as well
     
  19. SimonsCat Registered Member

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    Position is an observable in physics, which means it can be described by a Hermitian matrix.
     
  20. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    MATHEMATICAL VISUALIZATION

    Visualize is-represent by means of optical images phenomena of another character: to visualize by means of graphs the feverish course.

    In the drawing (2D) of a cube we visualize the third dimension.

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    In the phyllochron line we visualize the flow or passage of time.

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    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 29, 2017
  21. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    What we perceive as time, in context as time is normally understood, is the observation of change

    We pick a start point of the change and pick a finish point of the change and give this an arbitrary measurement which has the title of time

    However the measurement has recorded age

    The Universe does not have a fundamental time unit

    Only NOW exist

    NOW does not have a thickness of time
     
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  22. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I agree, but mathematically, the NOW can be predicted, before it becomes NOW.

    This happens on a universal scale as well, the causal potentials form an abstract mathematical dreamlike image of what is the become expressed in reality as NOW. David Bohm calls this quantum state the *Implicate Order*.
     
  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    In reference to the first paragraph you appear to imply a movement of time ....
    NOW can be predicted before it becomes NOW ...

    My impression from what I have read NOW came into existence at the big Bang and has never stopped being NOW

    As I have attempted to explain elsewhere in this post think about making a movie

    As I am sure you know the movie relies on a sequence of stills being viewed on what ever device is suitable for the medium of the recording

    Between the stills is a sliver of a gap when no recording is being made

    But in the gap (during the gap) the NOW in the real world still exist

    Hence no movie camera or other device can capture a continuous NOW only a sequence of NOWs which become WAS

    NOW does not have any sliver gaps thickness and (a change of thought here) a thickness stretching back to the Big Bang

    Second paragraph is two complicated for my 2 brain cells to process sorry

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    Last edited: Feb 2, 2017
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