Kronos5253 said:
I disagree..
Yes I agree they do, but the future is only there in small segments, just because of the time it takes for light to reach your eye and your brain to make sense of it. Aside from that, the future isn't determined. Someone can't observe what you'll do tomorrow because it hasn't happened yet. I understand that there's a lag in the comprehension of the universe, but "with a large enough telescope" he could only observe your past.. not your "tomorrow".
When you are traveling at very very high speeds, time dilation occurs and your tomorrow might be the day after tomorrow for another stationary observer. Think about how that is possible - what you perceive as now might be someone's tomorrow, or someone's next year or someone's next millenium. This can only be possible if past, present and futre all exist at once, but when you are in the same frame of reference, time manifests as if flowed, when in fact the flow of time as far as relativity is concerned is a technically incorrect term. The block view of time in relativity is pretty solid and isn't something new or special.
In SR time enters equations in a manner completely identical to that of space.
This relativistic symmetry between space and time completely revolutionised
the concepts of space and time, by merging them into a single entity called “spacetime”.
As we certainly do not have a good reason to say that space lapses, relativity suggests
that time does not lapse either. Instead, relativity suggests a picture of the block time,
where time is nothing but one of the coordinates on the static 4-dimensional manifold.
All we know about relativity is perfectly consistent with such a picture. According to
this picture, the universe does not evolve with time. Instead, the universe is kind of
extended in 4 dimensions, one of them being called “time”. Both the “future” and the
“past”, as well as the “presence”, are there, without any of them being less certain or less
real then the other. Whaty's more, any attempt to define “future”, “past”, and “presence”
in an observer-independent way destroys the mathematical structure of the theory in an
artificial and arbitrary manner. And from experiments we know that the mathematical structure of SR is correct.
In other words, since universal Time is not uniquely defined in the theory of relativity, the assumption that there is a global flow of time in the universe is not compatible with relativity. Therefore, if we want to retain relativity, the block time is the only viable option.
So you might be asking - why is our subjective experience of Time so different than that in physics?
This is a very large topic that deserves a separate thread but for now i'll say that there exist 2 different notions of time - Subjective Time and Physical Time(mixing those 2 and using pure human intuition at this level of understanding is often very misleading).
For now you have to accept that physics says nothing about your subjective feeling of flow of time. But physics doesn't really say anything about emotions, love, beauty, joy, etc, does it?
That makes no sense. The past also only exists as essentially a movie. It's coded in the light that you reflect. So yes your past exists somewhere, but only as a movie or picture. If you somehow followed the light that you reflected when you were 2 years old, you could isolate it and watch it as a movie, but you wouldn't actually travel back to that point in time. You might as well say that you can jump into the picture on a tv screen while watching a family video of yourself. That light exists, but physically it's moved on. It takes what, 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the Earth? So you've got give or take that much time for the future to exist at the same time as the past and present.
At least IMO, from the way that I understand it.
I lost you here, i think you might have misunderstood what i said.
