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Yes

Yes, sort of. They’ve done it without a BEC, IIRC. It’s a matter of maintaining the photon’s information. The photon is not confined, as such. It’s absorbed, but a photon with identical properties is later emitted. No energy loss is a required part of doing this. I think scaling it up has insurmountable problems and even it didn’t, a prohibitive cost.

Lunchtime. doubly so...

It is the outcomes of measurements of time that are numbers, being the readings on idealised clocks. That is a subtle but important difference. Also, just because something can be quantified does not imply that it is an illusion - that’s a non-sequitur. The reason we know that time isn’t just an “illusion” is first and foremost the existence of gravity, specifically the tidal aspects of gravity. If you had only three spatial dimensions, but no time, it can be formally shown that tidal gravity as we observe and experience it could not exist. But since it evidently does, we know that time (as the concept is used in physics) is quite real, at least in the classical domain. On quantum scales on the other hand, the issue is more subtle and rather less straightforward - a case could potentially be made for time to not be fundamental on small enough scales. However, that would make it emergent, and still not an “illusion”; again, an important difference.

I’d likely approach this conversation differently if we at least had universal healthcare, but we don’t. I did, however, wear my mittens whilst walking the dog in subfreezing temperatures earlier

Yes, that’s what I’m wondering - if you have any idea what’s involved in scaling this up, or the limitations involved.

That’s not what your link says. The number would be under 28 million, based on that information.

I haven't followed this thread so I don't know the context of your paste of an excerpt from Keisler's 1977 or so book on NSA. What you wrote here is perfectly true, since both the hyperreals and the standard reals are models of the first-order theory of the reals. But in order to construct the hyperreals, you need a gadget called a non-principal ultrafilter on the natural numbers. Such a thing exists only in the presence of a weak form of the axiom of choice. So the logical principles needed to build the hyperreals exceed those needed to build the standard reals. Secondly, the hyperreals do not satisfy the least upper bound property, because they are non-Archimedean. Third, Keisler's book is not about research, since the hyperreals were first constructed by Hewitt in 1948 and nonstandard analysis was developed by Robinson sometime afterward. Keisler's intent was to write an NSA-based textbook for freshman calculus. It's telling that in the 44 years since then, no other similar books have been written; and calculus is still overwhelmingly taught in the traditional manner based on limits. There are occasional NSA-based calculus courses given, and studies show that by and large, students come away just as confused about NSA-based calculus as they do from traditional calculus. So we see that (1) NSA offers no pedagogical advantages (else more schools would have adopted it since 1977 and more texts would have been written); (2) NSA requires a strictly stronger logical foundation than the standard reals, namely a weak form of the axiom of choice; and (3) the hyperreals lack the fundamental defining property of the standard reals, namely the least upper bound property. As I say I'm not sure what your point is in pasting this excerpt so I can't comment on that. I'm just mentioning some context for NSA that you should know about if you care about NSA or wish to make some point based on it. Some light background reading of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafilter https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1838272/why-do-we-need-ultrafilter-for-construction-of-hyperreal-numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least-upper-bound_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_property

Then you should do that.

I'm a medical student. I read way more than you can imagine and understand the human physiological processes deeply. I don't need to read a book to understand that time is just numbers. What you(humans) are trying and have been trying to conceptualize is something miles and miles away from your grasp but unfortunately the so called books that you're asking me to read cannot help you understand that.

If you are so knowledgable about BEC why don't you share your science? You think a video from Harvard Institute is sci-fi?

Firstly, understand that time is an illusion. Humans count 86400 seconds (1440 minutes or 24 hours) to make up one day and that is what is called time. Time is just numbers people give to different moments of the existential plane. So you cannot really talk about the age of the universe or whatever when really time as we know it is an illusion. I think that there is another concept beyond our reach in this dimension that would be more suited to talk about what you people call time. Secondly, time did not come into existence. Think about what people call time travel. You are different from what you were 10 years ago physiologically not because of time but because its a physiological process. Time is an illusion. I like to think of it as an adjective rather than a noun. I see it as a description of something rather than something in its self. So you're wrong when you talk about 13.7 billion or whatever. That is a concept that is still miles away from human understanding.