Estranged

When it comes to jobs that may very well require the sacrifice of your life, all should have a choice. If someone believes in a cause, they should have the right to fight for it and sacrifice the self for it, and if they don't believe in it they should have the right to abstain. It should have nothing to do with male or female. The US draft system is sexist in the least and barbaric in truth.

A proposal: Time is actually a constant even though we may not ever be able to measure it with complete accuracy. Isn't it reasonable to believe that even with all the fancy clocks we can't really measure time as a constant? There's too many variables. Nothing is stationary. Relative station cannot be reasonably figured. We have human weaknesses. Measuring time is certainly one. The clocks on the planes going around the Earth, to think that they could account for all variables, and to think they could account for aging, seems absurd.

I'm sorry y'all, this thread was driving me crazy and it seemed healthy to just ignore it. I'll get back to it one day. I do believe that the questions I'm asking are important. This is the most interesting post I've read. I'll have to read it another 20 or so times before I can begin to understand it though.

There is nothing special about biological systems, but they're still different from mechanical systems. Biologic aging is different from mechanical clock rate. I'm not sure how you can claim that time is not a human invention. If you could describe time without being human then I'd be REALLY fascinated. OK, but what does that have to do with age?

The important point here is that time dilation is not an effect on the clock. It can't be. For example, right now you are traveling at 0 km/h relative to your chair (no time dilation) you are also travelling at hundreds of miles per hour relative to Mars (a bit of time dilation) you are also travelling at 99% of the speed of light relative to cosmic rays (a lot of time dilation). Your clock can't be running at multiple different speeds, affected by every relative velocity. OK, that's all fine, but does it have to do with human age?

The most public explaining I've tried to do is right here. This stuff has really been bothering me to the extent it interferes with my life. And it seems like no one can really answer me. I just googled "science forums" and I got here. I don't know what else to do.

Thank you. That means a lot to me actually that I'm not completely crazy! But I guess physics is kinda wrong when they try and describe time in regards to age.

First, saying "explain the difference" is much like saying "explain the sameness." Anyhow, we all seem to agree that time is relative, right? There's also been assertions that age is a measure of time and that clock rate measures time. Correct? Now, considering the relativity of time, I think it not all so absurd that age measures time differently than clock rate.

I'm sorry I didn't see your response before. So you agree that age and clock rates can have time differences. That means that it's possible that if a person travels at a very high speed away from Earth and comes back a very high speed, then their age could be just the same as someone who stayed on Earth the whole time.

OK, given that, could there not be a difference when it comes to clock rate vs aging?

Could age and clock rates have different reference frames?

Could you please elaborate? OK, so if there's not an absolute rate of time then there are different rates of time, yes? But time isn't constant, as explained, so things age in different times I guess, or by different ages.

Most of your responses are really confusing me. I'm just curious if anyone else could think of time measured by age vs a clock rate could be different? If I seem ridiculous, I'm sorry. I don't mean to.

So time passing is an absolute?

Obviously. But you knew that was an "egging on" question, right? Time is personal, not mechanical. Agreed. The mechanism of time is an invention, not a given part of the universe. Time was never given to us, we created it.

Damn, I should've been a particle physicist...if only public schools weren't so bad maybe they would have identified me more easily. I do have a hard time understanding how the biological body, regarding it's acceptance of time especially, isn't much different from a mechanical clock with gears and arms and such.

So you're saying that time is an absolute that can be measured by a clock?

When the biological body made the mechanical body, it seems implausible that the two could be impacted by the same processes.

How do you know?

Are processes in a biological body impacted the same as processes in a mechanical body?

OK, to be fair, I've been trying to absorb this for the better part of a decade. My newness to it is certainly relative. It's those things that everyone says "just accept" that I don't get. When someone says "just accept it because it's accepted" that's when I become really interested.

So the whole thing about the twins when one leaves Earth really fast and comes back really fast and the one who stayed on Earth is younger than the one who left...that's wrong? I'm talking specifically about age vs. clock rate, and how measures of clock rate haven't been shown to define aging. I'm just trying to start at a real low level, I can't think of any other way to build knowledge.

Man my head hurts. And Happy New Year to all! My New Year resolution is that I aim to go mad until I understand this stuff. The clock is a mechanical device developed by biological humans who invented the units that the clock measures. So that's how clocks are different from an aging body. A clock can't make things age and it might not be perfect at measuring age either. An aging body ages whether there's a clock or not. Changes in a clock's rate do not mean there's changes in other things that are effected by time. I get that clocks are supposed to measure time, and they do, but couldn't clocks be potentially bad at measuring time under certain conditions? Like when they go really fast? Maybe, while the clock changes under those conditions, other measures of time, like aging, do not. Aging and clocks are different kinds of time measures, right? This seems not only logically plausible to me, but likely. I hope I'm making some kind of sense. I really appreciate everyone trying to answer me. Why would you be aware if the difference is so minuscule? Maybe I'm not sure what you're saying. I don't really think I'm saying anything differently from you, in essence. Especially the part where you say "there are many quantities in Physics that appear in two guises which have the same units but are not quite the same." That's what I'm saying about aging vs clock rates, that they may appear to have the same units, but they may not be quite the same. It seems rather arrogant to me to me that our biological humanity could presume to invent a mechanical device that could measure aging with atomic accuracy.

But why? Why is it equally explained by the clock? you take that as a given? Aging is a different kind of clock, but it's not the same clock measured by minutes and seconds. The clock that makes relativity is not the clock of age.