What proof do we have that TIME exists?

[Chalnoth]

I would also be interested in hearing further clarification on this perspective.

Let me change your language a bit and see what happens:
Specifically, our brains process information about our surroundings at input (i.e. when observation takes place) and that input occurs at EVERY present moment. Is that time-ordered processing?

Well, the time ordering comes in due to the nature of entropy. Entropy fixes a set arrow of time, makes it so that things in the future depend upon things in the past. The appearance of time ordering that we interpret is a feature of this effect occurring within our brains, of this inexorable rise of entropy. It isn't the only thing that does this, however.

Also, are you suggesting that the "perceived world" is not orderly independent of observation?

No, not at all. What I am saying is that by virtue of how our brains work, we observe the world from a fixed perspective. That perspective is not, however, the only way to describe the behavior of the universe that surrounds us. We are starting to obtain inklings of just how different the universe can appear from different perspectives with our studies of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Holography in particular is a fascinating subject, where the physical behavior of one system in, for example, two dimensions is mathematically identical to the physical behavior of a different system in three dimensions. This means that for this system, whether we think of it as a two-dimensional system or a three-dimensional system depends entirely upon our perspective. And that is mindbogglingly weird.

sidenote: whether or not memories are stored in a time-ordered fashion is debatable, i think. i would have to dig, but recall research suggesting that memory can be unreliable b/c, with time, they can become "entangled", shall we say ;).

What I mean is that the order in which they are stored is ordered by time. Memories are, of course, distributed all across the brain, are not accessed in anything remotely related to time ordering, and are modified every time they are accessed. I was merely referring to the way in which they are originally stored.

 

[Mark M]

Think of Planck's time, we use a photon to measure it but is time the photon? Is time the length of the photons motion in one dimension? I liken time to the duration of the photon's motion not as one dimensional like the photon but as a dilating three dimensional sphere with the photon used as the radius, making time the dilating area that gives the photon's its direction in space.

It really isn't that trivial - time can be defined as T=\frac{D}{S}. At times less than the Planck Time, no distance is traveled by anything. Hence, T=0. No time has passed. So, we can quantize time into units of Planck Time.

 

[sahmgeek]

Holography in particular is a fascinating subject, where the physical behavior of one system in, for example, two dimensions is mathematically identical to the physical behavior of a different system in three dimensions. This means that for this system, whether we think of it as a two-dimensional system or a three-dimensional system depends entirely upon our perspective. And that is mindbogglingly weird.

Indeed, it is all fascinating and mindbogglingly weird! I suppose that is why I find myself here discussing it (in an orderly fashion, at ever present moments...)

 

[sahmgeek]

btw Homesick, if you don't already have it, Scientific American's "A Matter of Time" special edition had some really thought-provoking articles. http://www.scientificamerican.com/special/toc.cfm?issueid=40&sc=singletopic

 

[Tanelorn]

Is time not a physical characteristic of our Universe and our reality?
Time is also a relative measurement separating two events.

 

[petm1]

It really isn't that trivial - time can be defined as T=DS. At times less than the Planck Time, no distance is traveled by anything. Hence, T=0. No time has passed. So, we can quantize time into units of Planck Time.

Time is how we count existence; a clock can only count its own existence as a clock. A photon may not change in time as it moves in space, other than red shift, but its duration of existence always matches the length in space that it has traveled. Motion may not be measured at Planck's time but we should still have existence at that scale. Time is the smallest and largest common denominator of existence, everything that exists does so as its own part of our temporal universe, otherwise we would not be able to describe the anything as a four dimensional object.

 

[sahmgeek]

Is time not a physical characteristic of our Universe and our reality?

Can you flesh that out a little more?

 

[SHISHKABOB]

The above and your further comments in a later post about time having infinite speed.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I just walked past my desk - it has an infinite number of points on it, yet I walked past them in about one second - not t infinite speed.

I've only taken a class called contemporary physics that touched on quantum mechanics for just a portion of the quarter, but my understanding of it drew me to the conclusion that space was quantized. Or at least that's what I got out of the class. The idea that space is not infinitely divisible.

Therefore, unless this conception is erroneous, then walking past your desk *in reality* is not a matter of walking past something with an infinite set of points on it, but rather walking past something with a finite number of points.

If you take a line, and consider each and every single one of the infinite points on it as you move along it, wouldn't you never get anywhere?

 

[Drakkith]

I've only taken a class called contemporary physics that touched on quantum mechanics for just a portion of the quarter, but my understanding of it drew me to the conclusion that space was quantized. Or at least that's what I got out of the class. The idea that space is not infinitely divisible.

Therefore, unless this conception is erroneous, then walking past your desk *in reality* is not a matter of walking past something with an infinite set of points on it, but rather walking past something with a finite number of points.

If you take a line, and consider each and every single one of the infinite points on it as you move along it, wouldn't you never get anywhere?

Sure you would, as each point would be visited for an infinitely short amount of time. Or something like that.

 

[SHISHKABOB]

Sure you would, as each point would be visited for an infinitely short amount of time. Or something like that.

but... if it's infinite... then, each one gets an infinitely short amount of time but then what is 1/∞ times infinity and... ouch there goes my brain

I don't think 1/∞ makes sense anyways

 

[Chalnoth]

Being able to infinitely divide space merely means that dividing space is the wrong way to describe motion.

 

[alt]

I've only taken a class called contemporary physics that touched on quantum mechanics for just a portion of the quarter, but my understanding of it drew me to the conclusion that space was quantized. Or at least that's what I got out of the class. The idea that space is not infinitely divisible.

Therefore, unless this conception is erroneous, then walking past your desk *in reality* is not a matter of walking past something with an infinite set of points on it, but rather walking past something with a finite number of points.

If you take a line, and consider each and every single one of the infinite points on it as you move along it, wouldn't you never get anywhere?

I don't know whether space (or time for that matter) is quantized.

In post #18, a contributor said;
Super weird indeed. Moreover, if time exists, & it passes linearly, it should have an infinite speed, since it passes continuously..Time is weirder than existence itself

My comments which you addressed in the above, were simply to respond to that. But in any event, I'd always thought that a point is dimensionless - and that there are an infinite number of points in a line, as there are an infinite number of lines in a plane, as there are infinite planes in a solid. That's what I was getting at when I used my 'desk' example.

Regarding your last paragraph, this seems to me, a rephrasing of Zeno's Achilles and the tortoise paradox, which has been discussed here earlier.

Zeno's flying arrow paradox - now that's another thing. That one's really got me stumped, because imo, it goes to the heart of what is the present moment / instant in time. And that's a point I've been trying to explore for some time, but haven't gotten far.

 

[Homesick345]

I don't know whether space (or time for that matter) is quantized.

In post #18, a contributor said;
Super weird indeed. Moreover, if time exists, & it passes linearly, it should have an infinite speed, since it passes continuously..Time is weirder than existence itself

My comments which you addressed in the aove, were simply to respond to that. But in any event, I'd always thought that a point is dimensionless - and that there are an infinite number of points, in a line, as there are an infinite number of lines in a plane, as there are infinite planes in a solid. That's what I was getting at when I used my 'desk' example.

Regarding your last paragraph, this seems to me, a rephrasing of Zeno's Achilles and the tortoise paradox, which has been discussed here earlier.

Zeno's flying arrow paradox - now that's another thing. That one's really got me stumped, because imo, it goes to the heart of what the present moment, or an instant in time is. And that's a point I've been trying to explore for some time, but haven't gotten far.

MAYBE our existence, material universe, is finite & quantized, discrete, etc... And MAYBE our intellect or thinking is infinite, or at the very least - & this is even weirder - has a grasp of infinity, for some weird reason.

 

[petm1]

Super weird indeed. Moreover, if time exists, & it passes linearly, it should have an infinite speed, since it passes continuously..Time is weirder than existence itself

Time as measured with a photon has the speed of light tied to it thereby leaving no gaps in our view of reality.

 

[Drakkith]

MAYBE our existence, material universe, is finite & quantized, discrete, etc... And MAYBE our intellect or thinking is infinite, or at the very least - & this is even weirder - has a grasp of infinity, for some weird reason.

Or maybe a clock is just like a ruler but for time, and time is as finite or infinite as space is.

Time as measured with a photon has the speed of light tied to it thereby leaving no gaps in our view of reality.

Are you suggesting that time measured by something other than a photon has gaps in it?

 

[Chalnoth]

Zeno's flying arrow paradox - now that's another thing. That one's really got me stumped, because imo, it goes to the heart of what is the present moment / instant in time. And that's a point I've been trying to explore for some time, but haven't gotten far.

This so-called paradox is trivially shown to not apply to reality based upon one simple fact:
We can measure how fast something is going by observing it at one instant in time.

One way to do this, for example, is if there is a mirror on the object. If we bounce a single photon off of this mirror, that photon will be redshifted/blueshifted based upon how fast that mirror is moving away/towards us.

In a world where objects have both momentum and position, Zeno's flying arrow paradox makes no sense. It is clearly just the wrong way to think of the way the world works.

 

[Tanelorn]

Can you flesh that out a little more?

I was just suggesting that what we call time, and the continuous passage or flow of time, seems very much to be a physical property and characteristic of the way our Universe and our reality works. Without time, cause and effect would not work, because everything would happen at the same moment.

The passage of time acts relentlessly on matter and moves continously onward on matter through out all of space.
Accelerating to the speed of light slows down the passage of time to stationary observers.

I am mainly saying that time is not just an abstract measurement made with a timepiece.

 

[sahmgeek]

Actually, Zeno's flying arrow paradox makes perfect sense IF time and space are one and the same (i.e. if the true nature of time is another way of measuring things in space). I personally think this is a great candidate for the essence of "time".

 

[Chalnoth]

Actually, Zeno's flying arrow paradox makes perfect sense IF time and space are one and the same (i.e. if the true nature of time is another way of measuring things in space). I personally think this is a great candidate for the essence of "time".

Except they aren't the same. They are similar, but not the same.

Regardless, I don't see why you think this makes a difference.

 

[sahmgeek]

Except they aren't the same. They are similar, but not the same.

true. maybe i should have said:

time = a measurement of different locations in quantized space, where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is fundamental, as experienced by a single observer.

 

[Drakkith]

true. maybe i should have said:

time = a measurement of different locations in quantized space, where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is fundamental, as experienced by a single observer.

What? Time is not a measurement of space. We can use the distance that something travels, such as light, as a tool to measure time, but time itself is not a measurement of space.

 

[Chalnoth]

true. maybe i should have said:

time = a measurement of different locations in quantized space, where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is fundamental, as experienced by a single observer.

I do not see how this helps. Time, though very similar, does not behave like space.

 

[Tanelorn]

One way in which time and distance in space are somewhat related is that due to the way the Universe works, with a finite speed of light, the more distant an object is, the further back in time we also are looking.
It is very useful for understanding how the Universe evolved, because we believe the Universe to be similar everywhere, but it prevents us from seeing the Universe everywhere as it is today.

 

[petm1]

Are you suggesting that time measured by something other than a photon has gaps in it?

No, I think that the sea of photons we see as space fills the gaps in time very well.

 

[Drakkith]

No, I think that the sea of photons we see as space fills the gaps in time very well.

I'm sorry this doesn't make sense to me. What "sea of photons" are you referring to, how are they space, and how does this involve time?

 

[junjunjun233]

Maybe time don't exist at all. Its a perception of movements/change/transformation and so on (Point A-B-C-D-E etc). Since at quantum level, particle vibrate and eventually moves unless absolute zero movement is achieved, yet or never.

Actually in a sense we don't experience time. We experience changes and movements that we perceived as time and exist as observation.

 

[Drakkith]

Maybe time don't exist at all. Its a perception of movements/change/transformation and so on (Point A-B-C-D-E etc). Since at quantum level, particle vibrate and eventually moves unless absolute zero movement is achieved, yet or never.

Except that the movements/changes/transformations don't all occur at once. They take time.

Actually in a sense we don't experience time. We experience changes and movements that we perceived as time and exist as observation.

We measure time through change and movement but this does not mean we do not experience it.

 

[sahmgeek]

Except that the movements/changes/transformations don't all occur at once. They take time.

We measure time through change and movement but this does not mean we do not experience it.

What would that be like, to experience everything all at once? Wouldn't you experience something static? Would you actually experience anything at all? It's interesting to think about.

It seems to me that time is very deeply embedded in the experience of changes through space, from micro to macro.

 

[sahmgeek]

think about when you're watching a movie and they "stop time". what happens? all of the movement and change stops. almost as if they are one and the same. i certainly don't know if they are, but gosh...

 

[Homesick345]

Time as our psychological interpretation of events, whether they occur sequentially or all at once. Could time be our mind's way to arrange things, regardless of how they exist or occur really?