chill_factor said:
the pendulum in a sealed airless glass chamber is a non-dissipative system. For all intents and purposes it can go on forever. You can then measure rates with this pendulum in a sealed airless glass chamber. It will only emit isotropic blackbody radiation, which results in no net momentum gain or loss. With a magnetically levitated hinge, even frictional losses can go to zero. therefore it is a clock. Time is thus measured by oscillation periods..
Well even in this abstraction (gravity?), entropy, in the form of human memory (A highly entropy dependent process, presumably watching every "tick"), would still be required to measure the passing of time (or some other external entropic system, like a computer and a camera).
A proper clock doesn't just oscillate with no discernable arrow of time/assymetry, it progressively changes.
Imagine you had no memory (not even short term), and the pendulum had no clock face or measurement process. (Lets ignore the rest of the brains reliance on entropy for this scenario). Would the pendulum still measure time? Would we even have a concept of time? (Ill stop there so this is a hypothetical, rather than speculation)
I thought too before that (chemical) entropy and time were related. They aren't.
Well I suppose if its possible to conceive of an entropyless universe, that still changes, perhaps we can ignore the 2nd law, and its relationship to time. But personally I don't understand this is as automatically valid, as there would be no memory or brains (entropy required processes), so no observers and I still can't say whether such a thing could be described of having time, in the sense that our universe has time. It would be pure abstraction of course.
I feel like when I am imagining such things, I am stretching far outside of the bounds of what is knowable, testable or even imaginable. The closed system I operate in (life) has entropy in its progressive changes.
If there was a way of measuring and observing time, without entropy, logically, I might buy into the notion they are not intertwined concepts. But logically I can't conceive of any way that's possible, in fact it seems entirely illogical.
And when I think of situations without any entropy, if indeed that's possible, I can't really think about them having time, in any conventional sense. Even if they move, the only ones that know about it live in entropic systems, and use entropy to measure it, internally these entropyless systems are sort of static, constantly repeating, "time" symmetrical.
I don't want to get into any real concept of what time might be outside of this, but just for me, when I hear about dilution, and the arrow, as being part of the overall, albiet vague, scientific description of time, I take that literally, conceptually, that these are actual qualities of time. I suppose that's interpretive, but it also seems intuitive, based on observation.
Without these types of qualities, like progressive change, entropy, assymetry, dilution, I am not sure that what I subjectively experience as time, could be applied to any other kind of phenomena proposed as also being time-like.
Whether these descriptions are the best ones, or not, is unknown, as it always is with any model or theory, but they are the best we have at the moment. Maybe we would veiw these as more "hand-wavey" models/descriptions of time, or more literal and true ones, without which time as we know it, would not be.
But when people look at say, relativity, they don't just say "this is what things happen to do, but that says nothing about it", they say "this is the nature of the thing", and they say this with great confidence and emphasis. If we have accepted laws and math that describe time, is it so inappropriate to let the laws and maths speak for the actual phenomena?
IDK if mainstream science has anything like a position on this, though I've heard good, logically coherent, accounts of time from individual scientists.