Is Time Merely A Construct Of The Imagination ?

[petrushkagoogol]

Does time really exist ? Or is it merely a construct to provide translational continuity to an object in a real-world scenario ? 

 

[exchemist]

 

Does time really exist ? Or is it merely a construct to provide translational continuity to an object in a real-world scenario ? 

 

If you try to account for your experience of the world without invoking the concept of time, you will find it impossible. Ergo, time is as "real" as many other fundamental concepts we use. 

[petrushkagoogol]

If you try to account for your experience of the world without invoking the concept of time, you will find it impossible. Ergo, time is as "real" as many other fundamental concepts we use. 

 

Time is experienced when say the Earth moves around the Sun in space. It alludes to a translation of position which we quantify as a related entity called "Time". Time is tangible because our experiences are tangible. 

[exchemist]

Time is experienced when say the Earth moves around the Sun in space. It alludes to a translation of position which we quantify as a related entity called "Time". Time is tangible because our experiences are tangible. 

Time is experienced whenever we observe change, of any sort. It has nothing necessarily to do with physical movement.

[OldBill]

Well, to my visceral way of thinking, Time has everything to do with physical movement.....time being the 'flip side' of our favorite constant 'C'.....and may in itself be a very solid, firmly-rooted form of physics that we haven't quite gotten around to grasping as such. ….

 

OK..the next time you gaze at the Milky Way, on some clear Summer night, remind yourself that those 'stars' up there are actually nuclear fusion reactors, writ large. And large or not, they still have the same basic constructional requirements as any nuclear reactor, i.e. a fuel core, a containment vessel - to keep the core material from wandering off, and some manner of 'control rods' to keep the reaction rate at an optimized level, well short of that 'tipping point' - a premature Supernova.

 

Our Sun, a well-established member of said Milky Way, is no different than any of those other nuclear reactors up there, all varying mostly in size, age, and core composition, but with the same requirements – a containment vessel (gravity), and a control mechanism which- in our case - produces our favorite constant 'C'.

 

And that 'control mechanism' functions as nothing other than the severe suppression of dynamic flux – that maximum rate at which anything is allowed to move, and no faster.  In the case of our star - and its entire solar system (where we happen to live) that rate is labeled as 1 Planck Length per Planck Time, more than slow enough to successfully modulate how long it will take for the products of one nuclear event to advance toward, and eventually trigger the next event. And, as compared to allowing a supernova disaster, that very repressed rate of advance is not just    v e r y       s l o w … it is exceedingly, extremely slow. (By a factor of 'many hundreds', I would imagine).

 

And that's pure Physics, from which we, as stand-off observers, incur that exceedingly long 'flip-side' benefit: Time. Enough time to be conceived, born, and allowed to enjoy the wonders of childhood,(like gazing at the Milky Way), then mature, find a mate, pass on our DNA, raise our own brood, and eventually be surrounded by grand-kids.... while still finding time to express one's strange, visceral way of thinking in some remote Hypography forum. :)

Edited September 30, 2016 by OldBill

[A-wal]

Time is experienced whenever we observe change, of any sort. It has nothing necessarily to do with physical movement.

I'd argue that it has literally everything to do with physical movement and couldn't even be defined with out it. It's the change in the relative positions of objects. How could any kind of change occur in the absence of physical movement? But this rule is only because of the way that we have a limited perception of time and experience each 'moment' individually. I'll get to that.

 

OK..the next time you gaze at the Milky Way, on some clear Summer night, remind yourself that those 'stars' up there are actually nuclear fusion reactors...

There's actually a lot of problems with the nuclear powered stars model. I won't list them here because it's a whole other topic but what powers stars isn't as settled as main stream science would like us to believe. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist crackpot, whenever there's competing models the mainstream always picks the one it thinks is the most likely and then presents it as fact and completely disregards any alternative models out of hand. That's not science! Why are they so scared to say we don't really know but these are the most likely models? Funding? Nobody wants to waste money on something that's likely to be a dead end so they have to pretend that they know a lot more than they actually do?

 

 

Back to time. It's just another spatial dimension. The only thing that makes it appear different from space is our perception. We can see in both directions of three of the dimensions but in only one direction of time, we have a three and a half dimensional view of four dimensional spacetime. There is no moving timeline, that's purely a creation of our minds. If you think there's something special about this moment because of your sense of now, remember that you have that same sense of now at every moment of your life. At any moment we can only see (remember) in one direction and that's all that's needed to create the impression of time moving forward.

 

I challenge anyone to give a single {I've forgotten the word, I hate it when this happens, means empirical/concise/unambiguous} difference between time and space.

 

There's no physical reason why we couldn't remember the future. But once an event is remembered it's already happened so if you were to remember something that happens in ten years time you wouldn't be able to change it, that's thinking it terms of our limited perception of time. From your perspective you'd jump to ten years in the future and have a ten year memory gap. If you were then to get your memories back then that wouldn't help either, they've still been and gone.

 

Brain hurt yet? Try this. We meet an alien species that sees time in the opposite direction to us so from our perspective they remember the future but not the past and from their perspective we remember the future but not the past. Now imagine having a conversation with them. :) If you want to get really confused imagine that they can see in both directions of time so it's what we would call space and they have one directional perspective of one of our spatial dimensions.

Edited October 1, 2016 by A-wal

[petrushkagoogol]

I'd argue that it has literally everything to do with physical movement and couldn't even be defined with out it. It's the change in the relative positions of objects. How could any kind of change occur in the absence of physical movement? But this rule is only because of the way that we have a limited perception of time and experience each 'moment' individually. I'll get to that.

 

There's actually a lot of problems with the nuclear powered stars model. I won't list them here because it's a whole other topic but what powers stars isn't as settled as main stream science would like us to believe. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist crackpot, whenever there's competing models the mainstream always picks the one it thinks is the most likely and then presents it as fact and completely disregards any alternative models out of hand. That's not science! Why are they so scared to say we don't really know but these are the most likely models? Funding? Nobody wants to waste money on something that's likely to be a dead end so they have to pretend that they know a lot more than they actually do?

 

 

Back to time. It's just another spatial dimension. The only thing that makes it appear different from space is our perception. We can see in both directions of three of the dimensions but in only one direction of time, we have a three and a half dimensional view of four dimensional spacetime. There is no moving timeline, that's purely a creation of our minds. If you think there's something special about this moment because of your sense of now, remember that you have that same sense of now at every moment of your life. At any moment we can only see (remember) in one direction and that's all that's needed to create the impression of time moving forward.

 

I challenge anyone to give a single {I've forgotten the word, I hate it when this happens, means empirical/concise/unambiguous} difference between time and space.

 

There's no physical reason why we couldn't remember the future. But once an event is remembered it's already happened so if you were to remember something that happens in ten years time you wouldn't be able to change it, that's thinking it terms of our limited perception of time. From your perspective you'd jump to ten years in the future and have a ten year memory gap. If you were then to get your memories back then that wouldn't help either, they've still been and gone.

 

Brain hurt yet? Try this. We meet an alien species that sees time in the opposite direction to us so from our perspective they remember the future but not the past and from their perspective we remember the future but not the past. Now imagine having a conversation with them. :) If you want to get really confused imagine that they can see in both directions of time so it's what we would call space and they have one directional perspective of one of our spatial dimensions.

 

Space is temporal, time is conceptual.....

[A-wal]

Huh? Temporal specifically means time. The way we perceive a moving time line is purely conceptual.

 

Four dimensional spacetime is basically a grid reference system that shows the position of objects in relation to other objects, it doesn't change with time because time is one of the coordinates within the grid. All four dimensions are at right angles to each but how you set up the orientation of the dimensions is totally arbitrary, as long as they stay at right angles to each other.

 

There's no real physical difference between time and space. That's why in a closed and positively curved universe moving in a straight line in any direction (including time) brings you back to your stating point. It's also why singularities are singular in time as well as space, their length in time increases as you move away due to time dilation in the same way that their length in the spatial dimension increases as you move away due to length contraction. A black hole is what a singularity looks like from a distance, the event horizon would contract to nothing as you approach so can't be crossed. Special relativity describes gravity perfectly without any of general relativity's different frames of reference that directly contradict each other.

Edited October 1, 2016 by A-wal

[messy]

i think when hydrogen fuses to helium , it travels at the speed of light somehow ...

 

other than that , what time ?

[A-wal]

When hydrogen fuses into helium it produces neutrinos that travel at the speed of light.

 

What do you mean what time?

 

In general relativity you can create a four dimensional manifold as a 'stage' and assign any event with a set of coordinates and give all other events a set of coordinates based on their position relative to the first event and it's a completely static manifold, it doesn't change with time because time is included within it. That's how time really works, as the fourth dimension with nothing to distinguish it from the spatial dimensions other than our limited perceptions.

[messy]

is it about gravity having some sort of effect on the traveling helium particles ?

[A-wal]

No it's about neutrinos having no mass I think, like photons (light). Maybe somebody else could confirm that.

[messy]

oh ok , so much to learn ...

 

thanks for the replies ...

 

discussion always helps

[Mariel33]

No. Sequence is real, but I don't think time is. The ability to function is the need of sequence, and sequence is helped by the fabrication of time.

[xyz]

No. Sequence is real, but I don't think time is. The ability to function is the need of sequence, and sequence is helped by the fabrication of time.

Time is continuously, now is now and the next increment of now is adjoined to now. Time is not a rate or a sequence .

[CraigD]

I challenge anyone to give a single {I've forgotten the word, I hate it when this happens, means empirical/concise/unambiguous} difference between time and space.

To me, the essential difference between dimensions of space and dimensions of time is that rotations of an object involving 2 spatial dimensions can be performed with arbitrarily small quantity of physical work, while rotations involving a spatial dimension and a temporal one cannot.

 

Consider an ordinary meter stick oriented along the north-south axis. With a small amount of work (force applied over distance), I can rotate it to be oriented along the east-west axis. Its length on the usual, arbitrary 3 spatial axes (x,y,z) before was, let’s say, (0.05 m, 1 m, 0.01 m). After, it’s (1 m,0.05 m, 0.01 m)

 

Now consider the stick (or, to be precise, the history of the stick) with the time dimension added. With a lot of work, I can rotate it not to affect its x and y axis length, but to affect its t (time) and y length. I can “rotate” it from a before length of (0.05 m, 1 m, 0.01 m, 86400 s) (since a historied object has to have not only spatial but temporal extent, I arbitrarily gave this a lifetime of 1 day) to an after length of (0.05 m, 0.8 m, 0.01 m, 108000 s). This “rotation” is due to the familiar length contraction and time dilation transformations – the stick becomes shorter spatially, but “longer” temporally.

 

Unlike with a spatial dimension only rotation, which I can make with arbitrarily little work, there’s an well-defined minimum work required to make this spatial-temporal dimension rotation. Let’s say the stick has an invariant mass of 1 kg. To give it the spatial-temporal rotation, I must accelerate it to 0.6 c, which requires at least [math](1 - \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-0.6^2}} \,\mbox{kg} ) c^2 = 22468879468420441 \,\mbox{J}[/math]. (For perspective, this is a lot of work/energy – about 5.37 megaton TNT equivalent!)

 

Another way to look at this difference is to ignore work, and note that with the space-space rotation, the velocity of the stick didn’t need to change, but with the space-time rotation, it did.

 

My reasoning here is a bit lose and fuzzy, but hopefully enough to show that there is a concrete, essential difference between time and space.

[sluggo]

#1. yes

time is a mental construct enabled by the mind

#3.yes

Currently a second is defined as x wave lengths of light, i.e. a distance. Nothing has changed, the definition is just more technical with more precision.

#6. no

Time is only a dimension in a matematical sense, primarily due to Minkowski. The only motion is spatial, with 'time' being an accounting of the motion. The light clock is the essence of motion/distance labeled as 'time'. You can't remember the future, events that have not been observed.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Time is cumulative vs space which is not. It is just a number which only has meaning to humans. Aging due to time dilation is permanent, length contraction is not. The mind remembers previous states and connects them as a continuum. This becomes difficult for people with brain/memory problems. Movies are the classic example of the mind supplying the continuity where there is none!  

Edited October 6, 2016 by sluggo