Time; do you believe in it?

[vehystrix]

I could go on about this topic, but I think redirecting you to wikipedia will save me a lot of trouble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

You cannot refute that it is impossible for a system to change from one state to another. This means that at one point, there is a previous, current and next state, forming a chain of states following each other. This change in states is what is defined as time. BY DEFINITION, time exists, otherwise the universe would be at a standstill, and I couldn't have ever typed up this post.
*Note: this is the most simplistic explanation I could come up with, for an in-depth discussion, go to them wikipedia links and click most of the page they link to. 2nd or 3rd order should be sufficient to get you a detailed idea of the concept of time.

 

[Aurgelmir]

A couple of months ago i was watching a documentary on time travel and i couldn't help but dissagree with the theories being talked about, but it got me to thinking about time and the nature of it.

Now this might be quite a farfetched concept to a lot of you as i can't imagine you have seen many theories that say time isn't real, so bare with me and ill try explain this the best i can.


Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.


My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.


So that's roughly what i think of the concept of time. I want to know what you guys think about time and whether you agree of dissagree with my idea to whatever extent.

Time measure change, just as length is used to measure distance. If time was a man made construct it would not be one of the more integral parts of physics. Without time we could not have a concept of speed.

What you are referring to is the Telling of time, which is just a way to keep track of what day of the year we are in, but time is much more than that.

 

[Corjha]

A couple of months ago i was watching a documentary on time travel and i couldn't help but dissagree with the theories being talked about, but it got me to thinking about time and the nature of it.

Now this might be quite a farfetched concept to a lot of you as i can't imagine you have seen many theories that say time isn't real, so bare with me and ill try explain this the best i can.


Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.


My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.


So that's roughly what i think of the concept of time. I want to know what you guys think about time and whether you agree of dissagree with my idea to whatever extent.

I agree, I find that nothing can exist except for what's in the present moment.

 

[Zorg Machine]

movement is time. if you launch a photon in a straight line you can predict where it is going to be later and we know that something is going to happen. also, if we see a photon flying towards us, we can calculate where it was so we know that something happened.
therefore, we have past and future.

the standard length of time should be 1 light planck or the time it takes for light to travel the length of a planck (10^-35m) as this is about the same scale as quantum foam (according to einstein it is the fabric of space-time)

 

[Smooth Operator]

Hmm you are commenting on the measurement of time rather then the concept, it would be the same as commenting the measurement of space, that measurement is simply our attempt to put the dimensions and relations into a frame of reference, but our measurements define nothing other then themselves.

You need to view time as an added dimension to space, but unlike space we cannot move freely in time we just flow with it as if we were carried by a river stream, ofcourse from our point of view everything is moving with the river so everything appears to be standing still.

Hope that helps somewhat.

 

[Blemontea]

Finally someone else!
though i also believe in thoughts turning into physical concepts, meaning i think eventually time, to my ever loathing hatred, will fully exist. But we will still only be able to travel back to the point we created a time machine.

 

[Sgt. Dante]

I personally disagree with the concept of length.

I mean we invented an arbitary unit of measurement so we oculd put things in the context of the surrounding world and so we would have a standard deviation that would allow us to more easily communicate the concept of "A thing is this long."

In the nicest terms of course time exists, but it's a fairly arbitary assesment of how we understand the world. If we'd made a second last 20% longer and decided there should be 20 hours in a day it would still work just fine and it would seem like the standard, "normal" way of doing things.


captcha:Mulock edecatirm

 

[William MacKay]

everything is natural: we just label it. if nobody came up with the concept of time, it would still exist. the earth would still spin etc. time travel, though, is impossible unless you can travel at the speed of light (you cant you have too much mass).

 

[Scabadus]

You say there are 10 hours in a day, I say there are 3 centimeters in a meter. These blocks are how average people measure our universe and are based on local observations, not universal ones. By this I mean that people a thousand years ago wanted to know when their lunch break was, they didn't care about setting up a standard unit of measuremnt - based on radiactive decay or other universl constnats - they would allow them to communicate that time to extra terrestrials or whatever.

I mention extra terrestrials because they're mostly what's inspired these searches for standard units: if humanity ever gets into contact with aliens we want to be able to communicate maths and science to them. This means we need a standard unit of mass, length (often the mass and size of a hydrogen atom is used) and time (radioactive decay).

If you try, it's remarkably easy to come up with standard units of measurement that are based on the universe's most basic parts and not simply macro scale things like how long it takes our one planet to orbit our one star. But it's still easier to decide to set your alarm clock for 7AM and not three half-lives from when you go to bed.

 

[x EvilErmine x]

A couple of months ago i was watching a documentary on time travel and i couldn't help but dissagree with the theories being talked about, but it got me to thinking about time and the nature of it.

Now this might be quite a farfetched concept to a lot of you as i can't imagine you have seen many theories that say time isn't real, so bare with me and ill try explain this the best i can.


Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.


My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.[sup](1)[/sup]

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.


So that's roughly what i think of the concept of time. I want to know what you guys think about time and whether you agree of dissagree with my idea to whatever extent.

Time isn't a concept we invented, it's built into the universe in a fundamental way. Your argument lies in a misunderstanding of what time is and how we measure it. Thermodynamically then time absolutely exists, but it's not called time it's called entropy. Relativistic time is actually a bit odd in that 'time' and 'space' are not absolute. this means one second is not always a second long, it all depends on how you are moving

[sup](1)[/sup]This bit i dint understand. It seems a bit paradoxical. if there is only the 'now' then how can there be a 'used to be' to drive the 'evolution' of the present? How would causality work?

No time exists alright, there is a past and there is a future and a now that we call the present. There's nothing man made about that. The man made parts are the intervals we use to measure the passage of the time.

 

[Cato Novus]

A couple of months ago i was watching a documentary on time travel and i couldn't help but dissagree with the theories being talked about, but it got me to thinking about time and the nature of it.

Now this might be quite a farfetched concept to a lot of you as i can't imagine you have seen many theories that say time isn't real, so bare with me and ill try explain this the best i can.


Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.


My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.


So that's roughly what i think of the concept of time. I want to know what you guys think about time and whether you agree of dissagree with my idea to whatever extent.

Without time, everything would happen all at once.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

That was... ...beautiful.


Time is essentially the same as space, that is why it is considered the forth dimension. We just have a lot less flexibility moving through time than we do moving through space. (space =multiple speeds in multiple directions, time = one speed, one direction.) Consider this; if a million dollars was right beside where you are sitting, you could grab it, if it was 100 metres away you could travel over to it and take it. But if it was right beside where you are sitting, 30 minutes ago, you couldn't take it, or travel to a point in which you could, as you are stuck travelling forward in time.

 

[KedynCrow]

Chronos is displeased with this heresy.

Seriously though, Time with a capital T is an honest to goodness concept that only needs human measurement to make it tangible for us. It carries on, even if we don't measure it. You're correct that our manner of measuring it would change dependent upon what celestial body we use as a baseline for comparison. But it'll carry on without us measuring it. Chemical reactions continue to take place, tides change, celestial bodies rotate.

Time. It's science, not philosophy.

 

[crudus]

Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.

...

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.

By the logic in the first paragraph we could do the same thing with a meter stick. I could get a longer/shorter piece of wood and call it a meter. It really doesn't do anything for me though. What you did what change the way to measure something, not the something itself. It really doesn't change anything. The same amount of time will still pass and the same speed. If you want to change time just go really, really fast or go near something truly massive.

Is that a problem? The sun and the moon were the first way to tell time. They were pretty reliable too. Although now we use atomic clocks to keep track of time which are independent of the sun and the moon. Sure that is how we started to keep track of time, but we didn't invent time. Again, it is like saying since we thought up the meter, we invented space. Time is quite real since things like gravity and speed affect it.

 

[The Cheezy One]

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

I was waiting for it. Disappointed that it was only on the 14th post or so, but it least it was you, TimeLord!

 

[Yoshemo]

Time isn't just some weird idea thought up. Its a dimension just like space. But time here in the 4th dimension (as far as we know) only has one facet: going forward. In higher dimensions, we might be able to go backward in time. Or jump freely to different time lines. By your logic, we could assume that space isn't real either and that we're just imagining something thats not there.

 

[honestdiscussioner]

I don't have time to address this right now.

 

[AngloDoom]

Time, as my amateur understanding* of it, is basically terms of cause of effect. If there was no time, there would be no series of events or change and everything would be how it was forever unchanging.


* See: Guesswork

 

[King Toasty]

Time moves in one direction, is measurable, and can be altered around points of gravity. Yes, it exists.

 

[Magikarp]

Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon.

No, time is natural. How we measure it is manmade.