Zegel

Hey there, new to this forum, and I like it a lot so far =P. Heres something that has always bugged me:

I've heard quite a lot about theories involving time, space-time, and the like, but I've never really been able to understand them. It seems my belief on time differs from the scientific community, and although I usually give people like Einstein the benefit of the doubt, the idea of time is one of the issues that continues to bother me. Let me see if I can put it bluntly.

As far as I can tell, Time does not exist. It is simply an idea created by humans in order to reference Past, Present, and Future.

I feel that the only true part of that equation is the Present. The main problem that I have with time is that everything except the Present only exists in our minds. The past has already happened and only exists as memories. The future has not yet happened and only exists as we believe it may happen. If the Past and the Future do not exist other than in our minds, then the Present cant be plotted on a line because there is no before or after, just a simple point. Thus, you have no timeline.

Now, I know that part of my explanation is flawed. I am basing it on a belief that past and future do not exist beyond our minds, and that is a belief, not necessarily a fact. However, I have never seen any shred of proof that the past or future exist in any manner, other than to serve as an easy way for us to relate the constantly changing world around us.

So then I wonder; since all the great scientific minds tend to base their work on facts, how can they develop all these theories on time without proof that it exists?

Sorry if my post was confusing, but I hope you guys can shed some light on the matter for me.

wilbjammin

Without a belief in time, existence is chaos. Humans need reference points, whether you call it time or the combination of memory and imagination.

But, to be more specific... time is a measurement of movement. Would time exist as it does in a world that wasn't rotating?

I understand that there are some Native American tribes that don't conceive of time in a manner anything close to the Western Eurpean way... you might look closer into that.

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Zegel

Well, thats where I have the problem. Time is supposed to be a measurement of movement to describe the Present's foward progress along time timeline. But that belief relies on the fact that there is a past and future, or else there would be no timeline to move on. Yet those two things cant be proven to exist, other than their presence in our imagination.

Imagination doesnt do it for me, I like to deal with realities.

I think the accepted concept of time would definitely exist on another planet, even a rock millions of lightyears from any star. Our trusty clocks would still tick away the changing of the Present.

wilbjammin

Well, if that's your stance, I can't help you out. You perceive the world with your faculties as a human being, you can't reject that to gain an nihilistic view of time. Because things change and one event effects the next, because you grow old and die and babies are born, time is a part of our archetypal view of the universe in many ways.

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TheKak

Zegel you arent making sense. Time isnt a measurement of movement of the Present on some timeline, its a measurement of movement of Earth through space. Its just a measurement to keep track of events that have happened, or things people plan to happen. Time is relative, thats why 1 day is one Earth rotation, and 1 year is an Earth revolution around the Sun.

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John Henry

Remember that words like 'time' only serve to communicate our perception of a phenomenon. Nothing like 'space', 'time', 'chips', or 'Thursday' exists in a 'God said "Let there be Thursday" and there was sort of way.

You are simply describing the same phenomenon in a different way.

You could look at a photograph or Bill Bloggs or hear a recording of his voice. The fact that the photograph isn't sonic and the recording isn't visual doesn't mean that the guy in the photo exists, but the one in the recording does, or vice versa. It's just that neither of them is the actual guy.

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KnifeMissile

Time is defined as that which distinguishes two objects that occur in the same space. How can two different object exist in the same space? Because they did so at different times...

Cynthetiq

sidereal time to help mark objects travelling in space.

it's about the movement not about the idea.

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tecoyah

Try this:

Vega, a star over four light years away went supernova yesterday, It simply blew up.Looking thru my 12 inch telescope it looks just as it did two weeks ago. A little over four years from now, it will look quite different in my scope.

If the earth was rotating slower, my day would be longer, and my years would be longer as well if earth was slower in its orbit. As far as I am concerned, It would take longer for the light from Vega to get here so I could see the nova. The light however, would not notice and would take the same length of "time" or "space" to get here. Thus we have a constant, relative to my observation.

My question is this. Does the "fact" that light takes this period to travel here constitute a length of time, or a length of space?

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wilbjammin

Both, because the speed of light is a constant so you can determine distance from it. It's just like looking at your stop watch when you're driving on cruise control going 60/MPH down the highway for 4 minutes... you know that you've gone 4 miles.

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nash

This may actually be a physics question... Einstein's special theory of relativity deals with time and light and how there is no absolute reference frame when you're talking about when an event occurs. That is, something that happens simultaneously (e.g., I slam both my fists on the table at the same time) according to one viewer may not look the same to another viewer traveling close to the speed of light.

Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
The invariance of the speed of light is key to understanding all of this.

In a way, the speed of light defines time. If you say that light travels, and you agree that the speed of light is always fixed (disregarding speed changes in different mediums) then I would say that time exists (provided we are moving slower than the speed of light).

If you want to think about it another way, if you concede that space exists, time must exist as well -- because light from the star travels through both space and time to reach your eyeball. Einstein talked about how space and time are one-and-the-same in his general theory of relativity. Most of the scientific community (if you have faith in them) accepts his theory.

Try some of his thought experiments and see what you come up with!

:::OshnSoul:::

Time is for order in the everday and life-long events that occur to be able to estblish the difference between the periods between one another as far as events go.
Time and Space are the same thing, yet man has given them seperate definitions.
They both evolve around energy.
Time and Space always was, and always will be. Therefore, Energy that makes up the time and space, always was and always will be.
There are different dimension of time and space, yet they are occur simultaneously. Everything is happening NOW.
But some events can seem fast, some can seem slow. Some can seem far away in the future and past, yet some past events, for example, say your first bike ride as a child, may seem fresh in the mind as though it happened yesterday. That is all the illusion of time.
Space, also, is an illusion. Yes, it is to define different variations of, such as the space between me and the computer and the space beyond our earth.
To those out in space, time seems faster- lightning speed. Here, on earth, it seems like a voyage a shuttle crew takes is months.
That's what can get confusing and overwhelming to comprehend.
But, if we see that both time and space exist simultaneously, here and now, and not with a past, present, future as what man has defined, then we can start seeing how it all works.

orange monkeyee

I think time is like a ruler. Its a measurement. it works, it does what I need it to, and I don't care to think about it for a long long time.

Zegel

Thanks for the input, I think maybe I was looking at this from the wrong angle. How orange monkeyee put it is probably the simplest explanation of all, comparing time to the measurement of distance.

I guess even if I accept time more as a reality, I still cant believe that the past or future exist further than our imaginations. What was is no longer, what will be isnt here yet.. they dont really exist.

So, I still dont quite understand why it is thought that time can be manipulated. It seems much like an inch is a measurement that is always going to be static and unchangeable, so is time.

wilbjammin

It can't be, it is a constant... what can be changed how we perceive time, and there are weird tricks like when you travel around the world over the span of a number of days and it seems as though you've gained or lost a day compared to everyone else. As for the idea of time travel - great for sci-fi and Micheal Criton novels, not so great in practice.

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FleaCircus

But time is more than just a ruler. It is actually a physical dimension. By physical, I suppose I mean existential, in that it exists independently of any particular perception of it. But it's not a spatial dimension, in the way we think of left-right or up-down.

That, and time really isn't constant. The faster you go, the more time slows down. Think about this:

Two twins synchronize their super-accurate watches. One kicks back here on earth, drinking margaritas and watching T.V. The other climbs into a spacecraft and zips around the galaxy for what he thinks is a year. The only catch: he does it at close to the speed of light.

He gets back when his watch says he's been gone a year. But when he sees his twin, his twin's watch says he's been gone fifty years. And yet both of them are correct.

The closer you get to the speed of light, the greater the differential. The further you are from the speed of light, the lesser the differential. But what this does mean is that time passes more slowly for someone on top of Mount Everest (faster velocity due to the rotation of the earth) than it does for someone at sea level.

It's just a negligible difference, so no one notices. Read the relativity section of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" for more.

I know I gave a physics answer in a philosophy forum, but there you go.

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wipeout

time does not exist only the thought of keeping track of it does

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tecoyah

If I percieve the passing of time, does it not then exist. And if time exists to my perception it must be real, at least to me.

question? If you are forced to wait for something you really want now, time has quite an impact does it not?

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Andy

Have I met any of you previously on Trafalmadore?

prosequence

Sorry, don't have time to discuss.

(Tycoyah... how do you know the star exploded ?)

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tiberry

Zegel -

I think you and I may have something in common. Check out this thread...http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...threadid=39145

Somehow I got into this conversation before....

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essendoubleop

What if things only age instead of time going by? The "black matter" is really nothingness because it contains no nutrients, nutrietns used by organic objects which are worn down by it until they die and leave behind offspring to utilize the offspring. Since there are no nutrients in outer space, it will forever remain stagnant and removed from "time."

I just had a brain squirt and only caught half of what I thought of into this paragraph.

FleaCircus

How can you determine whether or not things have aged without using the concept of time as a reference? And doesn't the idea of "stagnancy" implicitly require the concept of time?

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essendoubleop

Well by our standards, aging is wearing down of tiny microscopic tubes that are worn down by carrying nutrients etc. Since black matter contains no "tiny tubes" it can't wear down and experience time and aging.

Zegel

essendoubleop: Although aging and 'time' are related, it cant be said that without aging there is no time. The concept of time that we think of would continue to tick away even if there were no lifeforms in the universe.

Its easy to think of time in relation to what happens as it ticks away. We can easily account for time by watching the process of aging, or watching our planet circle the sun... but dont be fooled into thinking those things ARE time. They are just processes that occure as time passes.

queedo

I agree that time is only a reference to help humans meet at the same time at the same place. As far as the past, there is proof of the past through movies and pictures that multiple people can agree on about past events. The future doesn't really exist untill it happens, then it will be the present, then quickly become the past.

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synic213

Forgive my ignorance, but I could never quite grasp this concept and perhaps someone here can explain it to me better than a textbook. If time is only just a marker created by humans to map changing events, how can this rate at which time occurs change with the spped at which an object is moving? Has any one ever done an experiment were two identical, extrememly accurate watches were created and placed a two spots on the Earth, one at sea level and one on the top of Mt. Everest, and time at the tip of Mt. Everest was proven to "move" more slowly? Or is this difference in time just too small to measure with modern technology? It seems like spatially, a person standing on Mt. Everest has travelled a greater distance (due to the Earth's rotation) in a the same amount of time as a person standing at sea level, but the point is, the same increment of time has passed.

FleaCircus

Yes and no. The time dilation is so negligible at this small scale that it's not easily perceived, but it is measureable, and experiments have been conducted that demonstrate this.

I wish I could come up with a more intuitive explanation of this aspect of relativity off the top of my head, but, unfortunately, I can't. I'll work on it, though, so check this thread in the next few days, and I'll see what I can come up with.


Edit: You got me thinking, so ended up finding another way to explain it. Check out the next post.

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FleaCircus

Okay. I've come up with a different way to explain time dilation:

Imagine you're racing your car in the salt flats. There's a start and a finish line, but the racetrack is very wide; it's the salt flats, so there's no curb and no shoulder.

Now imagine your car only goes 60mph. If it's 10 miles between the start and finish lines, it'll take you 10 minutes to complete the race. But if you don't drive straight, but drive at a diagonal, it'll take you a little longer. Some of your constant speed of 60mph isn't being applied in the start-finish direction, it's being applied in the side-to-side direction. The more diagonal you drive, the more side-to-side you're going, and the longer it takes you to complete the race.

This works because you car only goes 60mph. No more, no less, so there's no way for you to make up lost time. The 60mph is constant, how you apply it to the two dimensions in the example (side-to-side and start-finish) is up to you.

Now, this is the leap that Einstein made: The speed of light is constant, and everything is always moving at the speed of light. Everything. But now we're not talking two dimensions; we're talking four. Up-down, left-right, forward-back (our regular 3D world) and, for the fourth dimension:

Time.

Rather than time slowing down, think of it this way: The more of the total speed you're allowed (the speed of light) that you apply to motion in the three spatial dimensions, the less you have available to move through time. And as you move through time more slowly, you age more slowly, your watch ticks more slowly, everything happens more slowly.

As it stands now, most of our lightspeed allotment is applied toward motion through time, so increasing our speed through space a small amount, as in the Mt. Everest example, takes very little away from our motion through time.

If a car goes 120mph around a racetrack, and it takes 30 seconds to complete a lap, as measured by a stationary bystander, the driver will clock that very same lap, from aboard the racecar, as having taken 29.99999999999952 seconds. A little difference, because in the bigger picture, he was only taking a little more of his lightspeed allotment and applying it toward motion than the bystander.

But if the car went 99.5% of the speed of light, the time dilation increases to a factor of ten. At this speed, if the bystander measures 30 seconds for a lap around the track, the driver measures only 3.

And since photons are the only things that move, through space, at the speed of light, it means that there's nothing left over to use as motion through time.

Light, then, doesn't move through time at all--it never gets any older. Light emitted from the big bang is the same age today as it was then.

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We must all have waffles and think, each and every one of us to the very best of his ability."
-- Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.

Yakk

How to imagine a 4 dimensional universe:

One day Mr A Square woke up.

He lived his entire life in "flatland". To you , it would look like the surface of a table.

All Mr A Square could see was things on the surface of the table: to him, space was two dimensional. He couldn't see within the body of another Square, he could just see the perimiter.

Then, along came Mrs ThreeDee. She started talking with Mr A Square, by drawing two dimensional images onto the table. This was very strange to Mr A Square, things appearing out of nowehere, and disembodied voices talking to him. Mrs ThreeDee taught Mr A Square all about the third dimesion, or tried to, and showed him how she could reach inside objects and modify them or move items through the 3rd dimension and appear to teleport them.

(the above based very roughtly off Flatland: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...76162?v=glance )

Ok, now imagine if Mr A Square didn't live on a table, but rather lived in a cube. At any one height, he could still only see two dimensions, but going up or down other "times" would exist, outside of Mr A Square's perception.

A moving slice through this cube would be completely indistinguishable from a moment of the table-top flatland.

Now, imagine if you are living in a 4 dimensional universe. The extra dimension is time.

There is reason to believe it is worse than that: remember that in the "cube" flatland, the time dimension was measured by height: what we percieve as time didn't really matter to the cube, because all times (heights) existed at once.

If the cube blinked into existance for a fraction of a second, and then disappeared, it would be the same existance to residents of Flatland as if the table top existed for a long time.

Physics is indicating there may be something like 10 dimensions out there. 6 of them are very small, so small that we don't notice them, 3 of them are space-like and one of them is time-like.

That was too much blather. =)

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

FleaCircus

Not that it makes a huge difference here, but M-Theory and 11D Supergravity require 11 dimensions. 3 spatial, 7 curled-up, and time.

Weird shit, isn't it?

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"We must have waffles. We must all have waffles, forthwith. Oh, we must think.
We must all have waffles and think, each and every one of us to the very best of his ability."
-- Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.

macro

Time is the 4th dimension, and is completely intertwined with space. To explain why it is a 'dimension', take this example. You say to someone to meet you out the front of your house at 1:00pm. If any of those coordinates (dimensions) are incorrect (your longitude, lattitude, elevation, time) you will not meet your friend.

Anyway, the best and clearest explanations of these principles I've read is in "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, and I recommend you go straight to this book.

synic213

First, thanks for all the explanantion! You guys are awesome.

Now the debate:
Ok, I comletely accept the fact that time is another dimension (4th) and that it is conceivable that there are even more dimension out there to be discovered. The point I cannot grasp is the effect that these dimension have on one another. The way FleaCircus describes it above is as if we have a limited amount of "energy" to apply to all existing dimensions, and if we apply more "energy" to one set of dimensions (spatial), then we have less "energy" to apply to another dimension (time). Why is this the case? Why do we have limited "energy"? What happens when we reach or exceed this maximum "energy" threshhold? I realize "energy" isn't the correct word to use, but I couldn't think of a better one, sorry

Another side question, does the common theory of relativity assume that light speed is the fastest speed an object can travel, or can an object travel faster than light. If an object could travel faster than light, does that mean the object would get younger?

Mantus

Does the author do a good job at explaining time dilation? I still have trouble grasping what speed does to a particle that make time move slower in the rest of the universe from it's referce point.

rsl12

mantus, here's an ez explanation:

if you take it for granted that light travels at a constant speed no matter your reference point, then consider a John Glenn a very fast train and Jesse Helms watching from the train station. John glenn has on his rocket a neat little device--it's two mirrors facing each other at a distance, and in between is a pulse of light bouncing back and forth between them:

----- mirror

^
* --pulse of right
*


------ other mirror


The distance between the two mirrors is L, so that in L/c seconds, john glenn will see the pulse of light go back and forth 1 time.

Now if you're jesse helms watching this same contraption through the train window as it whizzes by, the path light takes looks like this:


--------- ----------
* *
* *
* *
*
---------

the light looks like it's travelling a longer distance, yet it also looks like it's still travelling at speed c! Therefore in L/c seconds, it will not complete a single back-and-forth. time appears to move slower in the fast-moving rocket ship.

Now if you turn the whole contraption 90 degrees, you can see that fast-moving objects appear to be squashed. I leave that one for you to figure out.

EDIT: that second picture messed up--i can't figure out how to get it to draw!! anyways, i mean for the astericks to go in a diagonal path down-right, and then a diagonal path back up-right.

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