Nature of Time

I personally believe that time comes with our perception and is unintentionally there, so not invented.

It makes values possible. It means we can come up with things like frequency acceleration, velocity, etc. To say that time was invented is to say that the universe is linear, in that its vector has no magnitude which doesn't make any sense.

But I suppose you'd be thinking that magnitude does not rely on time. And with causality aside I don't think I can elaborate.

But I will say that the only thing invented about time is its flow. What if flow is an illusion to an increase of its frequency as if time had quanta? And if time's essence is in quanta (you know, that sort of thing), then time exists in instances. And we are the observer of frequency.

Because flow implies frequency.

But thats absurd. Time has no subunits, no moment in time implies being inside or outside another moment of time. Therefore time has to be the most intrinsic thing in order to exist?
Now that I think about it I'd side with you on this.

It depends on how you define Time. If by time you mean reference points of successive events that we use to organize those events, then sure, we invented it.

But is that all time is? How abaout defining time as the succession of events apart from human experience? Do animals experience Time? If so, did we invent it for them. Do things have beginnings and ends? If so, is not the flow events in between Time?

Just some thoughts.

Correct me if I'm wrong Khethil, but isn't this explanation demostrative of the problem you're talking about? To have vector without magnitude makes no sense in the system of our invention which includes vector and magnitude! Holiday's was a self-validating argument, and that is no complement H....:bigsmile:

In my view, to seperate time from the phenomena of life (or, in the language of physics, from space, motion, matter, etc.) makes the concept 'time' utterly meaningless. I agree with you khethil; time is nothing but a symbol for change, ordered or measured in various arbitrary ways. The issues presented by relativity, on which i'm admittedly no expert, are, I think, the result of having previously assumed that time was something actually existent, like matter. If it hadn't been treated in this way and been understood only as the idea of change, there would have been no suprise in learning that change appears to occur at different rates from different perspetives.

Incidentally, I brought up this issue in the thread titled 'beginning of the universe, you don't say', as often I hear scietifically minded people, laymen, explain that the problem of ultimate causality which seemingly precludes a 'beginning of the universe' can be solved if we posit a period without time at the beginning, so that causality is not neccessary. That whole idea smacks of Kant's practical reason as the basis of a critique of pure reason, if you get my point. In any case, time cannot be removed from the world as it is not anything, but rather a symbol of the world, whose essential nature is change.

Yeah I know bright moon. I like to write it out as I think, so I change my opinion so often and quickly.

But change requires a separation of events. There has to be displacement between events. We can have nothing in between relative events and change is identified from those events. So if time had essence then one instance of time implies another instance of time (in its essence). But since that doesn't matter because in potentiality we only rely on change, I guess I agree with Kethril.

But I admit, originally I had considered time to be deductive in its nature, but it is not a part of nature.

Thank you very much for your replies. It gives some insight, but doesn't quell-the-fire (so to speak).

So many well-meaning and vastly intelligent folks (scientists, mostly) speak of "time" as a force (entity? phenomina?) that exists separately-and-distinctly. Most of these people are far more intelligent than I, yet when I look at it: Time is a useful concept we apply to sequences or rates. We can look at a notion and say ".. yes, this describes time" yet Time doesn't exist as a separate entity; at least that's what it seems.

It's a useful term; needed term! But bent, traversed and objectively measured (that isn't *really* measuring something else), I'd really love to hear it.

Thanks again for your posts

I believe that time exists because without it nothing would exist.

Say, did you ever consider that it is not in actuality that this 'time' can be traversed, but in potentiality? I'm just asking because that is the entire theory as opposed to your actuality. It will flabbergast most people though; the empiricists amounst us for instance.

Just to be completely tuned in here:

You don't know what paradoxes are, do you? Don't worry, you're not alone. I actually promised some others to write a small explanation of this in the very near future. Just be warned that it might eliminate any and all links to what 'the general public' (<--empiricists...those people who swallow the lies) percieve as 'reality'. You'll be completely lost and everybody will continuously try to convince you you are a raving lunatic when trying to explain what you percieve. It'll take a lot of stamina not to end up in the nut-house once it fully sinks in. An example might be that I, in the first period after gaining this insight, hung a sign on my front door saying: "Nuthouse", with an arrow pointing out. I am very sincere in stating that indeed just about every person is mixing up their thoughts with what exists in reality and is therefore, literally, insane. Not that it isn't an endearing quality or anything...

Anyway, just a warning...is that what you don't see?
That might be difficult to answer if you don't know what I am talking about...Let's put it this way: Could you follow the above?

Yes exactly. Actuality implies nothing except itself, which is nothing.

As I understand it, time is a dimension. It only has a local meaning in that, the rate at which events happen is influenced by gravity and speed. This explains that when the speed of light is measured locally the speed is always the same no matter what the circumstances of the measurement are. However, it can be seen that light is bent by distant large gravitational masses and therefore it can be safely assumed that the rate at which events happen in that location will be different, and that means all events.
I hope this helps.

No, the words gobbledeegook and hulabaloo come to mind while reading your post. I love a good paradoxical, deliberately vague statement as much as the next guy, but I would like an explanation. Essentially, here is my objection, which addresses your premise, not your point, as I don't know where that is; what is the difference between actuality and potentiality; from what perspective are you dertermining what is actual and what will shortly be actual; if from the individual perspective (the only persp. in my view), I would say that potentiality never exists except as an idea, while everything (experiences and ideas) is actual. In other words, actuality I define as experience, which is everything and potentiality is only one idea amoung many, such as 'masking tape', which are all part of experience.

Any thoughts?

P.S. BTW, I agree with you that most people don't quite get it; they confuse there ideas for the context in which the ideas are occuring. I can hardly bear the subjuntive these days, unless the person who uses it is really a ****. I vainly call myself a realist. :sarcastic:

The 'nature' of 'time', is 'thought'.
Without 'thought', there is no 'time'.

"An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere."
Einstein, Albert

Here's something that you might find interesting. I did not write this, but found it on the net. Please excuse the length, but it does provide some food for thought;

The Nature of Time

TIME IS AN ASPECT OF 4-D SPACE-TIME. FOLLOWING OUR HOLISTIC LOGIC: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE ARE PARTS OF SPACE-TIME. THEY EXIST IN IT SIMULTANEOUSLY. PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE ARE PRESENT IN SPACE-TIME, NOW AND AT ANY OTHER MOMENT OF OUR TIME. WE EXPERIENCE SEQUENTIALLY IN OUR TIME WHAT EXISTS ACTUALLY SIMULTANEOUSLY IN TRANSCENDENT REALITY.
THIS CONCEPT OF SPACE-TIME IS EMERGING FROM MODERN SCIENCE. JOHN GRIBBIN DESCRIBES IN HIS BOOK THE HYPOTHESIS THAT MANY WORLDS EXIST IN PARALLEL TO, AND INTERSECT WITH OURS, WITH OPTIONS TO BRANCH OUT. GRIBBIN ALSO DESCRIBES THE WORK OF FEYNMANN, WHO SHOWED MATHEMATICALLY THAT SUBATOMIC PARTICLES CAN TRAVEL BACKWARD IN TIME.
HOLISTIC LOGIC TELLS US ALSO THAT TIME HAS NO BEGINNING AND END. THE LIMITATIONS THAT WE PERCEIVE IN OUR ORDER DO NOT EXIST IN HIGHER DIMENSIONAL ORDERS. A BEGINNING OF TIME IMPLIES A SEPARATION FROM NON TIME.
On the Past Present and Future and the One Way Direction of Time
Eric Lerner perfectly explains THIS IS ONE OF THE DEEPEST PARADOXES OF CONVENTIONAL PHYSICS TODAY. ACCORDING TO ALL THE LAWS OF PHYSICS THERE SHOULD BE NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, NO DIRECTION TO TIME.
IN RELATIVITY THEORY, FOR EXAMPLE, TIME IS SIMPLY THE FOURTH DIMENSION - THERE IS NO MORE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE THAN BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT. THERE IS NO FLOW OF TIME: ALL THE EQUATIONS WOULD LOOK THE SAME IF TIME WERE REVERSED.

Why does time move forward? Is there a difference between past and future, or is it, as Einstein believed, merely a persistent illusion?
The importance of the answers extends far beyond their role at the center of a consistent cosmology. They strike at the heart of some of the greatest mysteries faced by science, philosophy and religion - the questions of the nature of human consciousness, the relation of mind and body, and free will. The distinction between past, present, and future is basic to our experience of consciousness - we are conscious in the now, we remember the past, but we cannot know the future. It also is central to our idea of free will, for it implies that our actions in the present affect the future, that the past is fixed but the future can be changed. How can these ideas be reconciled with a concept of physical laws in which past, present and future all exist equally and cannot be distinguished?


IN A HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE, EVEN TIME AND SPACE COULD NO LONGER BE VIEWED AS FUNDAMENTALS. BECAUSE CONCEPTS SUCH AS LOCATION BREAK DOWN IN A UNIVERSE IN WHICH NOTHING IS TRULY SEPARATE FROM ANYTHING ELSE, TIME AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE, LIKE THE IMAGES OF THE FISH ON THE TV MONITORS, WOULD ALSO HAVE TO BE VIEWED AS PROJECTIONS OF THIS DEEPER ORDER.
AT ITS DEEPER LEVEL REALITY IS A SORT OF SUPERHOLOGRAM IN WHICH THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE ALL EXIST SIMULTANEOUSLY. THIS SUGGESTS THAT GIVEN THE PROPER TOOLS IT MIGHT EVEN BE POSSIBLE TO SOMEDAY REACH INTO THE SUPERHOLOGRAPHIC LEVEL OF REALITY AND PLUCK OUT SCENES FROM THE LONG-FORGOTTEN PAST.

No doubt the idea of motion backward in time makes a grievous assault on common sense. The world just does not seem to operate that way, as our ever-aging bodies testify. However, to a particle physicist raised on a diet of Feynman diagrams, motion backward in time is not all that disturbing. All fundamental particle interactions work backward as well as forward and, with rare exceptions, do not distinguish between directions of time. Feynman used the idea of motion backward in time when he invented his famous diagrams in the late 1940s. Dirac had developed his fully-relativistic quantum theory of the electron in 1928, and discovered that it contained negative energy solutions. These solutions were identified as anti-electrons or positrons. Positrons were observed as predicted in 1932. Following St?ckelberg and Wheeler, Feynman re-interpreted positrons as electrons moving backward in time [Feynman 1948, 1949a, 1949b, 1965b].
Feynman's idea grew out of his earlier work at Princeton as a graduate student of John Wheeler. Together they had developed a theory of electromagnetic waves involving solutions of Maxwell's equations that travel both ways in time, the so called retarded and advanced waves. The advanced waves travelled backward in time, that is, they arrived at the detector before they left their source. Despite their presence as valid solutions to Maxwell's equations, advanced waves had been previously ignored by less bold thinkers [For an amusing anecdote concerning Feynman's first talk on the subject, given before Einstein, Pauli, and other physics greats, see Feynman 1986, pp. 77-80]. Feynman later extended the idea to quantum field theory, in which waves are particles and vice versa, associating antiparticles with the advanced waves [Feynman 1948. See also St?ckelberg 1942].
Feynman noted that whether you say you have a particle moving forward in time with negative energy, or its antiparticle moving backward in time with positive energy, is really quite arbitrary at the fundamental level. Energy conservation and the other laws of physics remain intact. By reversing the charges and momenta of the backward particles, charge and momentum conservation are unaffected.


Nastavak:
1844-1906)
But the problem did not become acute until the statistical approach to the
thermodynamic laws was begun by Boltzmann, because previously no one was faced with the comparison between the reversible character of the elementary law and the irreversibility which had to be explained on its basis. Boltzmann, of course, actually introduced a new law in order to produce the irreversibility, namely a statistical element governed by a parabolic equation. It is only when the statistical element is combined with the mechanical laws that we get the irreversibilty of the second law. (L. Rosenfeld) (3:189)
Boltzmann believed that the two directions of time are indistinguishable. (2:6)
It is quite obvious that the Boltzmann equation, far from being a consequence of the laws of classical mechanics, is inconsistent with them. (Bergmann) (3:191)
Albert Einstein
(1879-1955)
What is new in Einstein's relativity is the complete separation between past and future. ... Einstein assumed time-symmetry in his theories, but this assumption was superimposed and not needed. It simply does not play any role, because of the complete distinction between past and future. (L. Brillouin) (4:108)
The Ritz and Einstein Agreement to Disagree ( 1909)
The electromagnetic arrow was the subject of a lively discussion by Einstein and Ritz in 1909.

Einstein (1909) argued that the retarded and advanced descriptions of radiation processes occurring in any finite region are equivalent, since the equations of wave propagation are symmetric with regard to time, but that the auxiliary conditions giving the precise circumstances of emission and absorption are very different. In the retarded description it is sufficient if all the macroscopic sources are known whereas in the advanced description all the absorption processes must be known, but unlike the former they must be fully specified in microscopic detail. In
practice, we do not have this information concerning the absorption processes and so we are obliged to use the retarded description. On the other hand,

Ritz (1909)
asserted that only the retarded waves have any physical significance, since advanced waves are not experimentally observed. The initial conditions characterizing the source (or sources) of the radiation are the causes of its transmission and consequently are responsible for the special role played by retarded waves. [According to Brillouin (1964), Ritz was the first to make this
point.] (L. Brillouin)
(2:339-340)
Lewis (1930) Winford Lewis ( 1787 - 1953? )
(Claimed that nearly everywhere in physics and chemistry the ideas of
unidirectional time and unidirectional causality have been purged. These ideas have been used to support some false doctrine, for example, that the universe is actually running down. Predecessor of absorber theory.(2:7-8) No satisfactory quantum electrodynamics could be developed until the retarded and advanced potentials were used simultaneously and symmetrically. (2:8-9)
Wheeler & Feynman
J. A. Wheeler and R.P. Feynman attempted to derive the ordinary irreversibility of radiation from the time-reversibility of Maxwell's equations. They argued that the observed properties of an electric charge, that it radiates energy and suffers damping of its motion can be explained in terms of an "absorber theory of radiation ". They used the Schwarzschild- Tetrode-Fokker equation for a flat space and found
that they had to postulate both "advanced" (future) and "retarded" (past) fields; the divisions of time seemed to be "inextricably mixed".

...Wheeler and Feynman assumed that (a) time-asymmetry is initially present; and (b) persists on a purely statistical basis. J.E. Hogarth(5) showed that assumption (b) is inconsistent with any realistic absorber theory of radiation. Heand D.W. Sciama argued that the Wheeler-Feynman theory of rad iation holds in the Steady-State cosmologies of Hoyle and Narlikar, but not in general, in the Einstein-de Sitter models. (C.T.K. Chari)
(4:216)
The dependence of the electromagnetic arrow of time on the thermodynamic arrow was a feature of the absorber theory formulated by Wheeler and Feynman (1945).
In an attempt to produce a theory of charged elementary particles which avoided the difficulties that had beset previous theories of their interaction with electromagnetic fields, they introduced the hypothesis that every photon has an absorber as well as an emitter. In their theory an accelerated charged particle emits radiation equally into the past and future. In other words, retarded and advanced waves are generated symmetrically. If the radiation is confined to an opaque enclosure, so that all of it is absorbed, the waves striking the walls will cause the charged particles therein to radiate likewise into both the past and the future.
Wheeler and Feynman showed that if the enclosure is fully opaque, the advanced waves emitted by the walls will just cancel those from the source particle and only the retarded waves will be left. ... Moreover, since all attempts to produce a quantum-mechanical version of the absorber theory lead to the same difficulties as previous theories of the interactions of charged particles with the electromagnetic field, there is no strong argument in its favour and in fact its original proponents have abandoned it. (2:341-342)
Rabbi Heschel wrote that the Sabbath is like a temple in time.
Levinson elaborates the idea.
"The Temple is to space as the Sabbath is to time."
Harry Belafonte
Time is illusion!

The Holographic Universe
by Michael Talbot
Universe is formed of electromagnetic waves which are interconnected (intercepting each other). With respect to this definition, we may understand that in the space, every point is full. There is no emptiness. The famous physician David Bohm, as a result of his research on subatomic particles, reached the conclusion that the Universe is a giant hologram. One of Bohm’s most important findings is that in reality, our daily life is an holographic image. According to him, the Universe is an endless, limitless one "WHOLE" holographic structure. It is meaningless to speak of parts.
The most important quality of the hologram principle is:- Each point in the hologram is able to give the image of the whole unit. Every point of the hologram receives and records the light waves coming from all over the object. Therefore, if the hologram plate is torn off or broken into pieces EVERY SINGLE PARTICLE IS LOADED WITH THE INFORMATION OF THE WHOLE AND WHEN NECESSARY CAN GIVE THE IMAGE OF THE WHOLE BY ITSELF.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Time is basic to world structure. Every change requires a cause. Everything that is in motion must be moved by something. (2:1)
Archimedes (287?-212 BCE )
Time flow is not an intrinsic feature of the ultimate basis of things. Author of first important treatise on statics laws of equilibrium (2:1)
Saint Augustine (354--430)
Remarks that time is at once familiar and deeply mysterious. "What is time?" he asks. "If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not."
Confessions, Book XI.14. Augustine, p. 239 (1912
Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642)
First to introduce time in dynamical considerations. Used his heart pulse as a time standard. (L. Rosenfeld, 3:188)
Isaac Newton
(1642-1727)
His mechanics dealt with ideal planets with no frictional, electrodynamic, or tidal, braking effects.
...the time variable does not appear explicitly in the mathematical formulation of the fundamental laws of physics. Indirectly, it is also associated with the fact that the laws of classical mechanics are reversible and do not distinguish between past and future. (2:20,21)
Newton assumed all forces acted at finite distances in an infinitely small time. This was indenspensible for the proof of his third law of equal action and reaction.
(L. Brillouin, 4:107) Old classical mechanics assumed an absolute time, that corresponded to the idea that actions could be propagated at any distance instantaneously (meaning infinite velocity). (L. Brillouin, 4:108)
Of course the LAW OF INERTIA, which was also formulated by Galileo and Newton, was thought by them to be an idealization, a limiting law which was introduced only in order to get a simple situation. Surely they thought that actual motions are irreversible, as are all observable motions. Newton was very much concerned about whether the orbits which he had calculated on the basis of the LAW OF INERTIA were adequate approximations to the actual planetary motions, which he thought
were retarded by friction.
(L. Rosenfeld) (3:188)
"We must...believe that there exists an even flow of time." (Newton, as quoted by
Gold) (3:188)
But at the same time he unwittingly introduced a paradox, by the fact that the laws of dynamics which he formulated turned out to be reversible in time. That was an unintended accident in his analysis. But this did not worry people much because they still had the notion of causality, implying a succession in time, namely that the effect follows the cause. Yet even that possible basis for keeping an irreversibility of the direction in the physical laws was undermined by Newton himself, who introduced the force of gravity as an instantaneous action at a distance. Surely he
was aware of the paradoxical character of this assumption, but he still insisted that it was the correct description of the actual law
of gravitation.
(L. Rosenfeld) (3:188-189)
Joseph Lagrange
(1736-1813)
By regarding physical time as a fourth dimension of space, Lagrange all but
eliminated time from dynamical theory. (2:3)
Nicolas Carnot
(1796-1832)
Then in subsequent developments, when people began to analyze and
formulate the laws of thermodynamics, the idealization of quasistatic phenomena was introduced by Carnot and his followers. This removed from causality the reference to time. Causality...became completely timeless. (L. Rosenfeld) (3:189)
Rudolf Clausius
(1822-1888)
Introduced observable irreversibility as a part of the second law of thermodynamics.
(L. Rosenfeld) (3:189)
[In this time frame people apparently began believing that Newton's approximations" of nature were "Laws" of nature and that nature was thus reversible. [rsf]
Physics was inconsistent: Newton's laws of motion were symmetrical, and the entropy law was asymmetrical to the direction of time. This difficulty was solved thanks to the illuminating work of many talented scientists,... (I. Szumilewicz) (4:182)
Ludwig Boltzmann

hello Khethil


Short response: It is certainly possible for a chain of events A>B>C to be viewed as C>B>A if there is appreciable speed differnece between two people viewing the events see special relativity ie the chain of events that you see is not absolute. If the event sequences that formed your concept of time were A>B>C and the sequence is not absolute, why do you think that the sequence can not be influenced ie the sequence must be able to be influenced if the sequence is not absolute.


True, but we did not invent the motion of the earth around the sun. What we did was to look for a precisely periodic chain of events so that a standard interval of motion could be assigned.


From Special Relativity the sequence of events are relative and if our concept of time is built from the sequence of events then an arguement exists for the comment "time is not absolute, but rather relative". if time is relative then there must be mechanisms to influence it.


It has been experimentally shown that gravity slows down time. GPS must acknowledge this phenomena in order for the GPS to work. See General Relativity


Do you mean muon decay?


The travel back and kill ones' father paradox does certainly exposes a flaw in the idea of travelling back in time. There are no paradoxes however in travelling forwards in time. See Twin Paradox


I apologise, I do not know what you mean. PS Atomic clocks do not work in the way described above.


Mathematics describes what is possible and Physics decides which possibility is a true representation of the universe.

Thank you Validity...

... without getting into the muck of all the intriguing issues you bring up, I'd like to focus on the existence of time as a phenomena separate from those used to measure it.



This might help, can you expand or perhaps give an example? It could go a long way to understanding the basics of this (that time isn't something else, it's its own animal).

Thanks

Hello Khethil

I will start by adding a clause (or correction if my ego would allow it :surrender:) to the short response I made earlier. The clause of causality and rather simply if A>B>C can be viewed as C>B>A then A is not the cause of B and B is not the cause of C. So unrelated events can certainly be rearranged based on the observers perspective.



Wow. I do not think there can be any short responses to your request to discuss the existence of time as a phenomena separate from those used to measure it.

An idea that I ask you to keep in mind is that a system can not be reduced into its parts, the parts seperated and expect the parts to function as the system did.

So, what is a clock measuring? A clock is a machine that is constructed to produce precise periodic output. Then what period is it set at? Well a clock can be set to any period by tinkering with its construction or as I have heard the hour hand of Big Ben travels faster from 12 to 6 then it does when travelling from 6 to 12 (gravity sucks). So a clock really does not measure anything, but it is rather set to a universally accepted standard definition of a precise period ie the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom*, which is known as a second.

Now remove all the caesium atoms from the universe (or stop all caesium atoms moving). What do we use now to define a second. We know the earth orbits the sun at approx 365 days in one orbit, so all we need to do is divide the shape of the orbit into equal parts and redefine the second based on the movement of the earth. It is inaccurate but still possible.

Now remove the earth and the sun (or stop them from moving)and you just keep looking for anything that moves to constructed a device to produce precise periodic output. You then remove all things that move in the universe (or stop every thing from moving). Then how do you tell the present from the future if nothing changes? I say you can not and I go one further and say time is nothing more than the allocation of a standard interval of motion.

It would seem that by removing the phenomena that is used to measure time, or reduce the system to its parts, you in effect remove time.

* Second - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You cannot remove time by removing your measuring tool of time. Or can you? What if time was like this random oscillation. Oscillating in a pattern that recognizes duration, and random in that it actually can be divided into parts.

Actually thats silly.

Maybe time is random and flowing but in relation to different environments that we don't have perception to. We really only experience the macro world, and so time seems to flow at a constant rate. And maybe time can be conveyed as a bell curve. Its randomness increases when perceived farther away from the the maximum point, being the normal macro reality we normally perceive or have adapted to. As we get more into the micro world, and to the macro macro world there is therefore going to be more randomness in space time. Flow is a perception of order and so if it becomes more random to our perception as we get more into micro/ macro macro worlds then we do not have all the variables to see that order, "intrinsicated".

A way around this is by adding more dimensions that are not as 'strong' in our normal reality.

Subjective time must therefore be the answer if time is represented through flow/randomness via bell curve.

And objective time must therefore be the answer if time is represented through flow/randomness via exponential/linear trend.

But I guess that doesn't really answer the question.

Hrmm... that does sound rather unfair, doesn't it: "Prove to me an orange exists without referring to sight, touch or taste". But then again, we didn't make up that object, did we?

Let's backtrack a bit; Validity, you spoke about sequences of actions in defining time. I hate messing with this browser so I won't re-quote, but you brought up the point that a particular sequence of events (A>B>C) could be viewed differently by someone else (e.g., C>B>A); thus, it is therefore relative and therein must be influence-able via some mechanism. This doesn't define what time is at all (since, the order of events doesn't define time, but rather the frequency or rate, if I'm not mistaken). Nonetheless, I'm curious, how might someone perceive a sequence of events differently than another? Have you an example perchance?

More Clarification on the Question: I suspect time is a word we came up with to describe the frequency with which actions occur. In some cases it's quite constant while in others its not. We needed a conceptual notion to describe these intervals, so we came up with this word. Gravity, molecular decay, complete revolutions of the earth and repetitive actions within physics all can generate actions/events with regular intervals and we describe these as "time"; yet, it exists as a concept only - cannot be traversed, bent, warped or traveled. If this isn't correct, I'd very much like to understand what... it.... is. If it is not a force that has some descriptive or common, objective manifestation except by clues from other principles, then it is just that: A concept with no independent substance or force on its own.


[CENTER]Action A, <No Action>, Action A, <No Action>, Action A

The human animal looks at this and says, "Hey! This is a useful concept... I need a word for this pattern... quick! Someone come up with one"
[/CENTER]


I can throw a rock, I can slow down a rolling ball, I can shield my eyes with my hands; these actions are quantifiable influences on speed, intertia and light. If I make up some new term and apply it to all three of these actions that doesn't make it something else that really exists and can be bent, slowed, sped or traversed. It just word used to describe a common thread in a collection of other observed phenomena.

Again, thanks for engaging me on this. I fear we've become so hopelessly accustomed to thinking within this conceptual box that we've allowed it to somehow be spontaneously-borne into objective reality.

But I truly do hope to understand this more fully.

... in so removing "time", have you also effectively removed "space"? ...

An example of reordering events is taken form the man who worked it out

Chapter 9. The Relativity of Simultaneity. Einstein, Albert. 1920. Relativity: The Special and General Theory

I would like to ponder the remainder of your post befor I offer a response

Hello paulhanke



I would say that depends on how time was removed.

If time were removed by removing the objects that are moving then you would end up removing all but one object. The question then is what meaning does the concept of space have if there is only one object?

If time were removed by stopping everything from moving the notion of before and after becomes redundant and impossible to define. The concept of space still holds meaning though.