Professionals pad .
Then these " professionals " will be able to kindly explain to me the material substance of time .
Does time exist?
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Professionals pad .
Then these " professionals " will be able to kindly explain to me the material substance of time .
Magnetic fields exist and are detectable.
I am unaware of a time detector.
We observe change. We cannot point a time detector at changes and observe any needle movement. (Ignore for the moment we don't have time detectors)
So why does time always move forward?
It doesn't. Doesn't move. Doesn't walk, crawl, hop, skip or jump. And it doesn't do any of those in any direction.
Humpty etc
No, they are measurable in that we can assign a bounded estimate of quantity (number times base unit) to them. In the formalism of Maxwell or QED, there is always a a single magnetic field present but it might be close to zero in quantity.
Your detector argument is flawed because a fish cannot conceive of a water detector until it meets an edge to the water.
But your argument is flawed in another way. Time is (in the useful conception of physics) not a field or a fluid. It's a dimension. A metrical freedom for things not to happen simultaneously.
Finally, you have not argued that time moves forward, but only that our perception of the passage of time all assigns the future to the same side of our various here and nows. This arrow of time is enforced by the laws of thermodynamics, but not (apparently) by molecular-scale physics. That is weird.
ForrestDean
Registered Senior Member
If this being true then it would be safe to assume that some day in the "future" we will be able to discover time travel.
I can promise you this with absolute certainty. No one will "EVER" be able to travel "back in time" and change what we have already experienced. For example, and I have already mentioned this in another thread, no one can go back in time and kill your parents ceasing you to exist - maybe they can kill your parents in some other alternate reality, but you will still exist in this one regardless. Also, no one will "EVER" be able to travel into the "future" and then "come back" to the present and tell us what we will eventually experience at that so-called "future" moment outside of mere predicting the current path of the collective consciousness.
Also, another thing that is certain is that this debate can go on indefinitely. Ultimately, like everything else in this world, it doesn't matter whether time is an illusion or not. What matters is the experience of it.
Time is not always recognized as a "dimension" simply because it is not "tangible" - it cannot be "observed" as such - but is nevertheless inseparable from the arbitrary three dimensions of "space", generally considered to be "length", "width" and "height". This is why theoretical physicists often refer to this model more appropriately as "space-time".
Einstein also encompassed "time" within the context of his "Special Theory of Relativity" which also takes accounts for associated factors such as "mass", "velocity" and "gravity". Ultimately of course "light" - in, the fundamental unit of which are photons" - must also be included.
However - "time" cannot, in and of itself be considered to be a constant, simply because the reference points for the arbitrary measurement and recording of time are specific to this particular aspect of Universe that we experience here on Earth. On other planets of course the referential basis for measurement of "time" would be completely different. Remove all of these arbitrary and fixed reference points and "time" becomes completely meaningless, except in the context of a subjective experience, or illusion, which is what indeed "time" really is.
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Your usual ignorance and trolling on display again river?
For the third time, time is not a physical construct; That does not mean it is not real.
I suppose you also reject magnetic fields...
Perhaps, one day.
https://plus.maths.org/content/time-travel-allowed
In brief: The laws of physics allow members of an exceedingly advanced civilisation to travel forward in time as fast as they might wish. Backward time travel is another matter; we do not know whether it is allowed by the laws of physics, and the answer is likely controlled by a set of physical laws that we do not yet understand at all well: the laws of quantum gravity. In order for humans to travel forward in time very rapidly, or backward (if allowed at all), we would need technology far far beyond anything we are capable of today.
Travelling forward in time rapidly
Albert Einstein's relativistic laws of physics tell us that time is "personal". If you and I move differently or are at different locations in a gravitational field, then the rate of flow of time that you experience (the rate that governs the ticking of any very good clock you carry with you and that governs the aging of your body) is different from the rate of time flow that I experience. (Einstein used the phrase "time is relative"; I prefer "time is personal".)
No, I can say with absolute confidence, that you can say nothing with absolute certainty.
Perhaps if in time we can travel into the past, all we would be doing is creating another time line
see previous article.
And of course you can claim what you like as you are in the alternative section, so fire away!
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/c...everyone-should-know-about-time/#.WFBXXhp942z
Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time
“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]
1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.
2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”
3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.
4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)
5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)
6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)
7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder.Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)
8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)
9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”
10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)
Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time
“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]
1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.
2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”
3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.
4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)
5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)
6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)
7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder.Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)
8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)
9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”
10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)
ForrestDean
Registered Senior Member
Nah, perhaps not. All we can do is experience other realities of which all exist at this very moment. There are no realities that exist in a "past" or a "future". They all exist right now at this very moment. They only appear to us as a "past" or a "future" because we experience each alternate reality in a linear, successive manner, just like individual frames on a movie film.
I'll accept that; As per the Kip Thorne article, time travel is not forbidden by relativity, but scientists recognise that "backward time travel is another matter; we do not know whether it is allowed by the laws of physics, and the answer is likely controlled by a set of physical laws that we do not yet understand at all well"
When I say I accept that, the emphasis of course is on your use of the word "perhaps" when you say "perhaps not" for the reasons highlighted in red.
While the laws of physics are the same in every frame, each frame sees the passage of time as peculiar to his or her own frame.
If I left Earth at 99.999% "c" and returned 12 months later by my on board mechanical and biological clocks, I will find that 225 approximate years have passed on Earth, and everyone I knew is long dead and buried.
This may be a semantics issue but while I am suggesting the laws of physics are the same in every frame you respond with "...sees the passage of time as peculiar to his or her own frame". The very essence of "the laws of physics are the same in every frame" is that the passage of time is the same in every frame. Edit. An egg take 4 minutes to boil in every frame, the speed of light is 186,00 miles/second in every frame. An elephant weighs (say) four tons in every frame. And so on.
Sorry if I did not make myself clear. Sure an egg takes 4 minutes to boil in every frame; But my 4 minutes travelling at 99.999% 'c' would seem like a year or so from the perspective of you back on Earth. That's time dilation, and how we could theoretically achieve time travel.
Plus of course while I may weigh 89kgs here on Earth, on the Moon my weight would be 15kgs.
Plus of course each and every frame is as legitimate as the other.
ForrestDean
Registered Senior Member
https://plus.maths.org/content/time-travel-allowed
Those words by the way were from the article by Kip.
Seems like we may be in the same thinking frame.
My contention is time does not exist as an entity.
I accept the statement of time being a measurement.
But just as you would not go to a hardware store and request a kilogram of metres but might buy a ruler, you wouldn't go to a watch maker (not even a blind one) for a kilo of seconds but might buy a clock.
The Universe does not have a external clock independent of itself. What it does have are internal clocks built by us to measure changes.
We construct arbitrary units and measure all sorts of occurrences and call it time.
I also agree
The past does not exist. So time travel into the past is impossible.
Not because we can't travel fast enough, not because we would create a paradox but simply because there is nothing there.
The future does not exist. Time travel into the future is impossible.
Not because we can't travel fast enough, not because we would create a paradox but simply because there is nothing there.
NOW is the only 'time' which exist. To be honest I am not comfortable in calling NOW 'time'.
I am having other (hope improved) thoughts on my ideas about how to make a movie that shows reality as it is.
Also had a new thought about 'the arrow of time'. Give me a bit of space to congeal and refine before posting.
ForrestDean
Registered Senior Member
And see, you said it yourself. The "concept of time exists", which is all it really is - a concept, a perception. The clocks we use are used to measure what we perceive and what we experience as individual moments in linear progression. This perception of time is truly relative to the individual. It is a subjective experience.
Time in and of itself is not a constant, and there is no proof anywhere of it being constant as it appears to be perceived differently relative to the observer or group consensus observers at the location or instance from whence the perception of it is being observed, and from which would be perceived differently in some other foreign world or situation. Time is just a label we invented to put upon the changes we experience so that we can function appropriately in this world and within the world society. Seasons come and go, the sun rises and sets, it takes "time" for an object to fall to the ground, we constantly have to wait for things to happen, etc. Change is constant and this measuring of change called "time" would appear to make time itself a constant, but nowhere is time shown to exist outside of change. Put yourself in a void such as deep "space" for example where there is no movement, no reference points, and no changes to observe, and time will cease to exist.
Time is not a natural aspect of Universe. Universe is all there is. It is All That Is. And it all exists right here, right now, all at once. There is no before or after Universe. All That Is exists Now.
Do you accept magnetic fields exist and are real?
Likewise time, space, spacetime; All are real and all have measurable effects.
Which supports the argument of the reality of time, dependent on speed and gravity or the geometry of, wait for it...spacetime.
The universe expands.....time still exists. Even in the addition of the CC of Einstein fame to maintain a static universe, the standard belief of the day, time still existed.
Of course time is a natural aspect of the universe!
http://robertounger.com/english/pdfs/singularuniverse.pdf
The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time:
ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER AND LEE SMOLIN
To think of the universe as a whole rather than of something within the universe is one of the two most ambitious tasks that thought can undertake. Nothing matches it in ambition other than our attempts to form a view of ourselves. In addressing this topic, we soon reach the limits of what we know and even of what we can ever hope to know. We press science to the point at which it passes into philosophy and philosophy to the point at which it easily deceives itself into claiming powers that it lacks. Yet we cannot cast this topic aside. First, we cannot avoid it because we are driven to understand whatever we can about our place in the world, even if what we do know, or might discover, represents only a small and superficial part of the enigmas of nature. Second, we should not seek to escape it because no one can develop and defend ideas about parts of natural reality without making assumptions, even if they remain inexplicit, about nature as a whole. Third, we need not turn away from it because among the greatest and most startling discoveries of science in recent times are discoveries about the universe and its history. The most important such discovery is that the universe has a history. Part of the task is to distinguish what science has actually found out about the world from the metaphysical commitments for which the findings of science are often mistaken.
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