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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 02/03/2007 : 07:13:27
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I don't know enough about the ins & outs of, for lack of a better term, Time Theory to comment on this, so, I'll let it speak for itself: quote:
Is time an illusion?
Plato argued that time is constant - it's life that's the illusion. Galileo shrugged over the philosophy of time and figured out how to plot it on a graph so he could get on with the important physics. Albert Einstein said that time is just another dimension, a fourth one to go along with the up-down, side-side, forward-back we move through every day. Our understanding of time, Einstein said, is based on its relationship to our environment. Weirdly, the faster you travel, the slower time moves. The most radical interpretation of his theory: Past, present, and future are merely figments of our imagination, constructs built by our brains so that everything doesn't seem to happen at once.
Einstein's conception of unified spacetime works better on graph paper than in the real world. Time isn't like those other dimensions - for one thing, we move only one way within it. “What's needed is not to make the notion of time and general relativity work or to go back to the notion of absolute time, but to invent something radically new,” says Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.
Anybody got the time? My watch is busted and I might be dead... 
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 02/03/2007 : 07:50:19 [Permalink]
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Way over my head. I stopped betting on nags in the cosmology and related derbies long ago, after betting on Fred Hoyle's Steady State to win vs. the Big Bang in high school. I wrote a long essay, which assumed Hoyle was right. (Lucky for me, my science teachers were biologists who didn't know their astrophysics, so I got away with it, with a "A.")
I'll just go on assuming time is real, until someone comes up with something better in an ergonomic consumer product package. Even if time is only a mental construct, it's a practical one. If these guys can't agree, or even understand quantum theory, I'm gonna stay out of anything resembling it. (Things that resemble it I define as all physics that I don't understand, or which hurt my brain, which, sadly, is most of it.)
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 02/03/2007 : 14:11:54 [Permalink]
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I think of the time dimension as the future being the outer edge and the past being the middle. We are stuck in the flow and unable to move around within the flow, only ride along with it. The reason it only goes forward isn't necessarily because it can't go backward, it could be because we cannot move against the flow. Or it could be that the flow is indeed an illusion and we are stuck on the expanding edge of time. In that case it is expanding rather than flowing and we are still unable to move within the time dimension.
Contemplating time is fascinating. To see the concept better, think of the light streaming toward us from light years away. Does the past exist? The light from the past does. Once that light passes us, it still exists. So does it now exist in the future? If we travel faster than time we will either pass it up and be in darkness or we will pass it and be in the future.
Does all the light that ever existed still exist? Is the light we see recycled through the time dimension? Does the light exist all at once in every time dimension? Does light move around within the time dimension while we are unable to do so?
Light and time are inextricably intertwined.
I tried to reconcile all this with real theories of time and found my concepts were somewhat naive of "special relativity" theory. So I suggest if anyone is seriously interested in contemplating time, start with special relativity. That's mind boggling to contemplate as well.
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| Edited by - beskeptigal on 02/03/2007 14:14:05 |
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