Strange question, but is "time" and actual "thing"?

missmallyb

I was thinking about this today in my Physics class. Is "time" an actual "thing" ? Or just the movement of the hands on a clock?
Please give me your opinion
(:
-Mally

bp_psy

What do you mean by an "actual thing".When you are going to understand what you mean by "actual thing" you are probably figure the answer on your own.

arunkumarg

One second is the time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 (9.192631770 x 10^9) cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom.

Feldoh

Yes but that is a human construct. What if there is some absolute time?

Hootenanny

Everything we use to describe the world around us is a human construct. What do you mean by absolute time?

Danger

I still love the basic answer: "Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

Okay, that could use a bit of work, but I didn't write it; I merely quoted it.

Feldoh

By absolute time I simply mean not man-made. Perhaps absolute is a bad word but you still get the point...

There are so many symmetries in physics I find it rather fascinating that with man-made time thermodynamics tells us that there is a lack of time symmetry.

Does it not seem at all strange that with man-made time there is a "forward" time bias on entropy?

Archosaur

This depends more on your definition of "thing" than it does on your definition of "time".

Time is just another dimention through which things vary. A dimention is a thing, albeit not one you can poke with a stick.

Also...

I'm still not certain what you mean by "man-made" time, but I am certain that the increasing entropy bias is not strange at all, because of this:

We experience time only because we have memory, i.e. we can distinguish previous seconds from now. The act of remembering is an increase in entropy (it takes a ton of calories to remember things). We percieve time as having an entropy bias because the mechanisms by which we observe time are time-dependent and entropy-forward.

Feldoh

Remove humans from the equation, remove any organism with memory. Does time still exist? With a lack of definition does time exist? We currently see time as an empirical observation, however is there an absolute time?

If you're measuring time using your memory it's still man made. The way the entropy is measured as increasing is still measured against a purely man-made measurement of time.

Danger

Yes. The only instance in which sentient or semi-sentient beings become involved is when they devise a method of measuring the passage of time. It occurs with or without their participation.

darkfrog

What if quantum time hypotheses are correct? Doesn't the chronon give us an absolute time scale to use?

Danger

If that is eventually proven, then yes. Time would be quantized. I have never seen, however, any serious evidence to support it.

missmallyb

haha thanks guysss<3

ManishR

i think of time as a variable whose value changes whenever other variable (have domain of more then one value) changes.
[tex]\frac{d}{dt}(infinity)>0[/tex]

[tex]\frac{d}{dt}(real\: number)=0[/tex]

russ_watters

"Time" is a man-made word with a man-made definition that describes a phenomena that actually exists. The definition of "time" doesn't create the phenomena, the definition was created to match our observations of the phenomena.

We don't make the rules by which the universe operates, we can only seek to understand them and write down our understanding of them. No.

Deveno

we perceive time the way we do because of what we are. while it is possible to speculate about what time might be like, outside of our experience of it, the fact remains that any attempt to verify this brings it within our experience.

i find the statement that anything actually exists to be highly speculative. it's a convenient assumption, in accordance with our experience, but that doesn't make it true, just plausible.

an alien species, with a radically different type of neurology, might experience time and space in a totally different way than we do. in certain kinds of abnormal mental states, even human beings experience time in ways that are inconsistent with the consensual views.

the degree to which all human beings are similar (genetic coding, basic biological structure, uniform molecular biological processes, etc.) make it unremarkable that we share many of the same views of the world, not only in our sensory data, but also in the sense we make out of that data. this similarity makes us all "biased", in accepting what is "common sense" (a deliberate pun).

what exists "out there", independent of what we observe, is likely to remain unknown. time is a useful construct, that helps immensely in making sense of what happens in the world, but it is not past imagining we might replace it with a more sophisticated concept at some point in the..hmmm...what we now call the future.

Drakkith

They may EXPERIENCE it differently, but time, just like distance and mass and such, still applies to them exactly the same way it applies to us. A unit of time for them equal to X number of atomic vibrations or whatnot, would still be the exact same for us for that amount.

The only reason we experience time in different ways depending on mental state is because our conciousness is the product of chemical and electrical reactions that can be influenced by different chemicals and experiences. However, a second is still a second, whether we perceive it like that in our minds or not. If I turn off a camera it stops recording. Time still applies just like it always does, but I have changed the camera. When I am unconsious I do not experience time like I do when I'm awake, yet it applies exactly the same as it always does.