Maurice: Magnanimous of you to respect him as a man, and sorry that you do not think much of his thoughts on time. Thank you for your detailed reply. I respect Einstein as a man, but that does not mean I can not voice my objections if he made some errors. I want you to read my opening post again, without prejudice then read your quote of Einstein. If you still have trouble seeing the error, then I believe the error is of a psychological nature, meaning you love Einstein and respect the man so much that you dismiss all criticisms. You have the right to claim that the moon is made of green cheese, which is about as sensible as your objections to Albert’s view of time. The above remark by you includes an assumption that Albert made some serious error relating to his view of time. I see no reason to believe that there is such an error. I am too dense to recognize what to you is an obvious flaw in Einstein’s view of time. Perhaps you can point it out to me. I have broken down my paraphrase of his remarks to make it easier to analyze. When an individual contemplates the events of his life, he is able to order them using the criteria of before and after. If he wants to be analytical, he can assign a number to each important event in such a way that events associated with smaller numbers occurred before events associated with larger numbers. Is there something invalid about the above? Perhaps you deny the possibility of ordering events as suggested. Perhaps you agree that the events in a person’s life can be ordered, but think it has nothing to do with a concept called time. If there is some error in the above, could you point it out? It is convenient to use a mechanical clock or some physical process to assign the numbers using consistent and equal intervals of what is commonly called time. Is there something wrong with the above sentence? The concept of time cannot be analyzed further, although physics seems to require the use of a continuous variable associated with the concept of time. Perhaps time can be analyzed further, but Albert seems to have described the basic concept without going into further details. I like his suggestion that a time variable be used in describing the laws of physics. I would be lost without such a variable, but perhaps you have other ideas. Is there some error in the above sentence? I am waiting to hear your view on the above. Your original post seemed to want to ignore time as a meaningless concept, preferring to use the concept of change. Perhaps you are merely trying to define time as some property of the concept of change. Perhaps you object to the concept of a flow of time from past through the present and into the future, which is a philosophical concept, not related to the laws of physics. At least I do not remember ever reading about the time flow concept in a physics text, where time is used as a variable in various equations. I think a useful notation is provided by the SR concept of events occurring at (x, y, z, t), which I believe was thought up by Minkowski and used by Albert. Do you have any thoughts about this? Perhaps you have devised a better notation. . I completely missed the point of your ball dropped on the moving train. Perhaps you are suggesting that the view of the stationary observer is a more correct view than that of the observer on the moving train, which I do not think is the point being made in books for the layman about Special relativity. Could you further describe the point you were trying to make? BTW: The stationary observer does not have some preferred view of the motion of the ball. He is unaware of various motions other than the motion of the train. At latitude 45 degrees, the rotation of the Earth imparts a speed of about 700 miles per hour to the ball. The orbital motion imparts a speed of about 67,000 miles per hour to the ball. Galactic rotation and the motion of our local galactic group toward a Great Attractor impart even higher velocities.
I don't have the frequency memorized but it is based on the number of cycles of an atomic clock. If others here don't post it I will search for the value.
Maurice: I suspect obfuscation to avoid facing the issues you brought up, but I will play your game for a little while. For my personal purposes, a second is indicated by my digital watch, which counts seconds from zero to 60 for each minute, or there are 60 of them in a minute and 3600 in an hour. 100 years or so ago, when I ran for a track team, I had a stop watch which indicated time in minutes and seconds, and I thought of minutes & seconds in terms of how long it took me to run half a mile. For most of my life a second has been approximately one heart beat when I was not excited or exerting myself. For a long time, I believe the official definition of a second was based on solar time as measured by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the sun, with there being 86,400 seconds in a solar day. Sidereal time might have been used instead of solar time for part of the twentieth century, but I am not sure of this. Modern physicists now define the second by defining the resonant frequency of the cesium atom as being some number of cycles per second. When this standard was adopted, the number of cycles per second was consistent with the previously used definition in terms of either solar or sidereal time. There is a government agency in Colorado which provides signals for researchers requiring accurate time keeping. BTW: The meter is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. When this definition was adopted, the best estimate of the speed of light was 299 792 458 meters per second. Future improvements in measuring technology might result in a very small change in the length of a meter, but there will be no change in the official speed of light. The adoption of this standard forever fixes the speed of light as 299 792 458 meters per second.
They may be chatting with u right now here in Sciforums ? I know some who r aliens and trying to twist human science so that humans dont break speed of light barrier and claim their fair share of space occupations. But thats not fair, humans have a right to evolve and spread, over this they have prolifirated our planet with destructive technologies, internet seems to help them, but I am gona stop them.
Your long lectures are not going to help you. Relativist conviniently avoid the most important questions that we ask. you are nothing but an Ape.
So how come you dont add up all thoes speeds to the particle accelerated in a particle accelerator ? Ignorance is blisss isnt it ?
So how come this cesium isnt affected by accelerations, I mean how come the nucleus of a cesium atom dont have inertia to be affected by accelarations ? Ignorance is blisssssssss
Anomalous:The following indicates that you have little knowledge of the implications of relativity. So how come you dont add up all thoes speeds to the particle accelerated in a particle accelerator ? So how come this cesium isnt affected by accelerations, I mean how come the nucleus of a cesium atom dont have inertia to be affected by accelarations ? The post by Maurice related to a stationary observer watching a train with a passenger dropping a ball. His post seemed to suggest that the stationary observer had a more realistic view of the ball, and perhaps suggested that it was some special view. I was merely pointing out that the observer was unaware of all sorts of motions relating to the ball, and did not have some special preferred view of the situation. Classical physics claimed that an observer inside a closed room could not detect un-accelerated motion of the room using mechanical experiments with no view of the world external to the room. This is sometimes referred to as Galilean Relativity. Special Relativity further claimed that no experiments using light or any other phenomena could detect such motion. These claims are the reason for talk about dropping balls when on a moving train. The experiments with cesium atoms are intended to calibrate clocks to indicate proper time for an observer in his own reference frame, and do not establish some universally applicable method of determining clock time for all experimenters in the universe. Does the above enlighten you a bit? BTW: I resent being called an ape, but such remarks make me feel superior to those who resort to insults rather than cogent arguments.
Time is just a perception of the human mind. Why is it that one person doing the exact same thing as another person, for the same amount of time might think that it has been longer than the other does, even if you were to eliminate all variables? Hypothetically, if a person was in an absolute zero environment, and 1000 years passed, it would seem like an instant to them because they did not have any reference to the passing of time. Correct me if im wrong...
You are correct IMO. Time, viewed as the passage of something like a flowing river, is a purely subjective experience. There are only events and a spacetime interval seperating them. That spacetime interval is also completely relative. Time exists, just not the way we commonly think of it.
One is clumbsy and stupid. Duh. What the hell? If I was around for 1000 years and did absolutely nothing (couldn't even sit on my ass as that would involve a variable), I can tell you right now that it would seem like 5 billion and 1/365th years. The day was included to show you it wasn't an instant no matter your definition of time.
First off, by absolute zero i mean 0 degrees Kelvin. Secondly, our perception of time is determined by the speed of our synapses firing in our brains. Again, hypothetically, if you were to speed up your body and brain, it would seem as though everything was moving at a slower rate, and the time it took for the second hand on a clock to move for you would be longer than "one mississippi".
Now we have posts talking about subjective perceptions and philosophy, not physics. BTW: It is philosophy which talks about time flowing from past through the present into the future. Physics merely uses time as a variable in various equations.
0 degrees Kelvin is impossible due to Heisenberg (quantum) Uncertainty. You can get very, very close though.
What about zero point energy theory? Is there anything to that? I know very little about this subject.
