How do you define Time?

yes. because there would be a past where things were not frozen.

either, something was always moving, or nothing ever moved. there's no in-between.

Time is not what we see on our clocks, cicerone... I was trying to explaint hat in my earlier post..

>>>>something happening makes time. because there is now a past.

say, you drink a glass of milk. you are in time. Because now, there is a past, where you were about to drink the milk. There is the present, while you are drinking the milk. And there is a future, when you know you will have to wash out your glass. Futures turn into presents, whcih turn into pasts, which turn into memories, which get stored in our subconscious. <<<<<


How does this have to do with our SUN???? our sun is merely MEASUREMENT of time.

[sorry for the capitals, I'm not yelling, jsut emphasizing]

Yes, really, what I meant to ask originally:

What is time? What is it? Is it anything?

Its funny: everyone is all worried about getting blown up by a terrorist, or getting shot by a mugger, or getting a disease and dying...but in reality, the thing that most of us will eventually succumb to is: the slow, imperceptible passing of time.

And we don't even know what time is. What is time?

Time: The number of times a given events occurs. Second - watch clicks. Year - Revolution around the sun. The nature of the occurence of events does not make this definition unsuitable even in relativistic situations, and it is the nature of how events occur that makes time appear to act strangely in such situations.

Someone (or everyone) keeps time when an orchestra is playing.

you "RANG?"

time is the relationship between objects in the universe; it is merely a scale upon which we occur.

I mean, is there really a past, or is it just a fragment of our memory?

if one examines the proven characteristics of 'general relativity' it becomes apparent that 'time' (or the illusion of it) is a local phenomena; and with access to sufficient supplies of energy, it is navigable.

Sorry BoGoWo, I forgot it was you.

How is time navigable? Do you mean the thing where his twin was in an airplane, with a clock, and the clock on earth went faster then the one in the plane or something?

But the present kept turning into the past. if time stood still, nothing could move. Hands on a clock may stop or get out of sync, but that doesnt mean time ITSELF stopped or got out of sync.

or wait...

does it?




h'mm

Now is now. The past is a memory stored in your brain. The future is a projection in your brain. When the past was happening it was now. When the future happens it will be now. Now is all there is.

so what is 'now'?

it is irrelivant like the famous saying goes,
unfortunately what determines time for us is our physical state, our bodies, trees, flowers, buildings were meant to ecay. outside this realm, the universe, does time exist, to me, no.

Now never exists. It's always the past and future.

Yes, it seems that the so-called present is that no-place where the non-existent future becomes the non-existent past. But does that make sense?

The answer :- How do you define Time?
Time is the 4th dimension of space.
Lets not confuse things by introducing any other dimensions.
A measurement in time is a linear distance between 2 points in space.
Just like the height of a cube is a linear distance between 2 points in space.

The "shape/size" of a "cube" is defined by its height width length and age (4 dimensions).

Imagine a box which is 1m (h) x 2m (w) x 3m (L) x 4 hours (T).
Imagine you pick that box up and hold the box in front of you so that one face is visible . You measure that face and see that it is a 2 dimensional rectangle that is 1 unit x 2 units.
You rotate the box about the 2nd dimension 90 degrees and you see that the rectangle in front of you is now 2 units x 3 units.
You rotate the box about the 3rd dimension and see that the rectangle in front of you is now 1 unit x 3 units. (at this point you have viewed all the dimensions/faces of the box you are familiar with).
You now rotate the box about the 4th dimension and see that the 2 dimensional rectangle in front of you is now 3 units x 4 units.

Hopefully you can now see that the dimension of time is in no way different from the other 3 dimensions.
This of cause also shows that the linear dimension of 4 hours is always in existence just like the other dimensions of the box and therefore there is no change in the box. This is why time is considered an elusion. If the box is 2 hours old you incorrectly think it doesn't exist at the point where it is 1 hour old or the point where is 3 hours old.

A point 1 meter along an edge of the box exists at the same "time/(plane)" as a point 2 meters along the same edge.
A point 1 hour along an edge (or life) of the box exists on the same "plane/(time)" as a point 2 hours along the same edge.

Coming back to what was said above "the linear dimension of 4 hours is always in existence " This shows a fixed unchanging universe where everything in the past and future exists. If there is no time there is no change.

Your brain cannot perceive the universe in 4 dimensions so it cops with it by viewing the whole of 3 dimensions but only examining sections of the 4th dimension.
So another crude analogy would be the universe is like a real of movie film. Its unchanging and all exists at the same "time" but because you only acknowledge a section of it at a time then there appears to be movement/change.

facinating Charon, (welcome to a2k; it must be cold out there, beyond Pluto!);
we seem to think along the same 'time' line!

Charon, Welcome to A2K. It's the first time I've heard an excellent analogy of time that most of us can understand - and makes sense. Thanks for sharing. c.i.

One should not confuse the measurement with the thing being measured. A yardstick isn't space, nor are clocks time.

The notion of time as to be looked at on at least two different levels.

In the perceptual world of multiplicity, time is change. Charon above came close to this in saying that time is space. If Charon's description is taken as better than the one offered here (change), Quantum realities may be easier to digest. If in an infinite universe consisted of just two stationary objects (A and B), and unchanging, space would exist as the relationship between A and B, but time would not exist because there would be no change. In a finite universe time would begin as zero became 1, and end at the terminal boundary. This is pretty much the classical model of time.

Einstein measured time in relation to a universal constant, the speed of light. Change in relationship to the speed of light (C), and between different objects within space may vary considerably. There have been numerous experiments demonstrating the accuracy of Einstien's equations.

At the other end of the cosmic scale, the almost unbelievably small, time (the measurement of change between "objects") again becomes very counter-intuitive. At very small scales, Einsteinian math and physics fall apart and do not appear to work. At even the atomic scale some electrons can co exist in two locations at the same time. That is, an electron "moves" between spatial locations with no time elapsed. At quantum scales "things", energy states or the stuff of which energy is made of, behave much more according to a strange set of probabilities. A single photon released in a blackbox with two 1 photon-wide holes will go through both openings simultaneously! At even smaller scales "time and things" get even weirder. At the Planck scale, the smallest we can conceive of, it is now believed that all the stuff that makes up our perceptual universe is reduced to it's most elemental. At the Planck scale leading theorists believe that there are almost infinitely small multi-dimentional figures. The number of extra dimensions varies from one mathematician to another, generally 6 to 13 dimensions are believed to exist at this fundamental level.

Interactions that we can never understand within those multi-dimensional figures give rise to the elemental forces that make up the physical universe. The "smoothing" of the unpredictable, given infinity where all possibilities will occur, gives rise to those elemental forces referred to in the preceding sentence. This raises the question of whether time preexists three-dimensional space. Interactions within multi-dimensional figures speak to change, and change is time. The problem is that we can no more understand the real nature of things in dimensions beyond the four we are familiar with, than a flatlander can conceive of the Y dimension. I believe there is also a question of whether below the Planck level there is one multi-dimensional figure, or many, and the answer might well have a bearing on our ultimate understanding of change and time.

The "laws" of space/time at the quantum level do work, but they don't appear to apply to human or cosmic scales. One of the intriguing consequences of Quantum theory is that all possible universes exist at the same time. No past, no future, just a single present that encompasses an infinite number of universes. This is especially interesting to us Buddhist folks.

In Buddhism, there are no gods nor souls. We live in an infinite universe without beginning, or ending. In Buddhist doctrine neither the past, nor future exist, and even the perceptual world of multiplicity that is the present is only an illusion, a projection or dream, of Ultimate Reality.

In this perceptual world time seems to exist because there is the illusion of multiplicity and change. We become attached to the idea that our individuality is real and occupies a place in space/time. We constantly try to hold on to a past and pursue a future, neither of which exist. We are "out of synch" with reality, and as a consequence suffer.

Your model is intriguing, Charon, but I'll have to work on it to understand your point. Sounds, at this stage in my understanding like a prelude to Zeno's paradox.

Asherman, thanks again for a wonderful discussion. It does seem that we live in a virtual reality, as you suggest in your final sentence.

Rate of Change
Time is the rate of change of an object. So when matter is moving at near light speed, its rate of change internally is slower, so time is slower. That's what I think.