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coltrane
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Do you ever have an "original" thought, then learn someone else thought of it first?
Hey everyone. I've lurked here for a while, but this would be my first post.
So, as the title suggests, I am curious to know if the following occurs often to anyone else: I sometimes think about ideas which I (naively) believe are possibly original to myself, and then become frustrated (and admittedly excited at the same time) when I learn that I was not the first person to think of this. This has happened in the scope of a broad range of subjects, but the most recent instance of this happening to me involves physics and philosophy (I know this is general discussion - the subject is general, but the example is coincidentally related to physics).
Here's the most recent instance. I was discussing religion with a friend of mine, and discussing the idea of an atemporal god. In this discussion, my friend told me that he doesn't believe time actually exists; he told me that he thinks we just use time as a way to describe the order in which events are sequenced. I told him that this did not make sense, since by this notion, two different events happening at different times apart from a third event would be indistinguishable in terms of where they fully lie in time. We would only be able to describe the order in which these events occurred.
After doing some thinking, I pondered that if there was a minimal amount of time that could elapse, then his idea of time only being a means of describing a sequence of events would make sense, since a measure of time could theoretically be described as a sequence of these nonzero infinitesimal time intervals. So I thought, "well, we have a universal speed limit - the speed of light, and I remember learning about the Planck length which could give us a minimal traversable distance." So I figured that the smallest amount of time in the universe would be the time it would take for light to travel one Planck distance in a vacuum. And then as soon as I thought of this and did some googling, sure enough, there it was: Planck time.
Not that I was truly arrogantly convinced that I had actually made some earth-shattering discovery about the fabric of the universe, but I did have a momentary rush of excitement followed by my bubble being bursted.
So, any similar experiences?
Hey everyone. I've lurked here for a while, but this would be my first post.
So, as the title suggests, I am curious to know if the following occurs often to anyone else: I sometimes think about ideas which I (naively) believe are possibly original to myself, and then become frustrated (and admittedly excited at the same time) when I learn that I was not the first person to think of this. This has happened in the scope of a broad range of subjects, but the most recent instance of this happening to me involves physics and philosophy (I know this is general discussion - the subject is general, but the example is coincidentally related to physics).
Here's the most recent instance. I was discussing religion with a friend of mine, and discussing the idea of an atemporal god. In this discussion, my friend told me that he doesn't believe time actually exists; he told me that he thinks we just use time as a way to describe the order in which events are sequenced. I told him that this did not make sense, since by this notion, two different events happening at different times apart from a third event would be indistinguishable in terms of where they fully lie in time. We would only be able to describe the order in which these events occurred.
After doing some thinking, I pondered that if there was a minimal amount of time that could elapse, then his idea of time only being a means of describing a sequence of events would make sense, since a measure of time could theoretically be described as a sequence of these nonzero infinitesimal time intervals. So I thought, "well, we have a universal speed limit - the speed of light, and I remember learning about the Planck length which could give us a minimal traversable distance." So I figured that the smallest amount of time in the universe would be the time it would take for light to travel one Planck distance in a vacuum. And then as soon as I thought of this and did some googling, sure enough, there it was: Planck time.
Not that I was truly arrogantly convinced that I had actually made some earth-shattering discovery about the fabric of the universe, but I did have a momentary rush of excitement followed by my bubble being bursted.
So, any similar experiences?