The nature of time ( question).

[Strange]

6 hours ago, geordief said:

I didn't mean set up by human agency but by a chain of cause and effect (in the macro world at least)

The sample of radioactive material got there as a consequence  of those processes. 

Does that make sense?

It makes sense. But I'm not sure how it is relevant. If there is an unstable nucleus that will decay after some (unknown but statistically predictable) time, why does it matter how it got there? Its (average) lifetime will be the same however it was created.

[geordief]

37 minutes ago, Strange said:

It makes sense. But I'm not sure how it is relevant. If there is an unstable nucleus that will decay after some (unknown but statistically predictable) time, why does it matter how it got there? Its (average) lifetime will be the same however it was created.

Elendirs was saying time required motion and Swansont disputed that.

I was  tacitly agreeing  with Swansont but asking whether the notion of cause and effect  we are seemingly familiar with at the macro level was a different beast at the quantum level. 

If so cause and effect at the macro level might also  be fundamentally statistical despite  appearances.

Edited February 28, 2019 by geordief

[swansont]

9 hours ago, geordief said:

I didn't mean set up by human agency but by a chain of cause and effect (in the macro world at least)

The sample of radioactive material got there as a consequence  of those processes. 

Does that make sense?

But it doesn't matter how the radioactive nucleus got there. It could be a product of decay, of fission, or fusion (or related processes). It has no memory of how it is formed.

[geordief]

41 minutes ago, swansont said:

But it doesn't matter how the radioactive nucleus got there. It could be a product of decay, of fission, or fusion (or related processes). It has no memory of how it is formed.

Is memory the same thing as information?

They say that information cannot be lost.

Does information imply memory?

Is it  at all possible to reconstruct  any aspect of the earlier state of such a system by observing the emissions?

Is information lost in any sense?(maybe "information" has a different definition in this context from my notion  of "what we know about  something")

[studiot]

9 minutes ago, geordief said:

Is memory the same thing as information?

They say that information cannot be lost.

Does information imply memory?

Is it  at all possible to reconstruct  any aspect of the earlier state of such a system by observing the emissions?

Is information lost in any sense?(maybe "information" has a different definition in this context from my notion  of "what we know about  something")

Well I think information can be lost and the circumstances under which it is preserved are somewhat limited.

 

Memory.

It is all too easy to assign some sentient connection to a natural process.

So you could ask does the river have a memory of where to flow or, ?

How does the water know which way to flow in the channel ?.

 

But aren't we wandering off topic and shouldn't this be a separate thread?

[ag400002]

Perhaps, as the photon passes through relative time, absolute time passes through the same photon.

Perhaps absolute time is the carrier of cause.

Perhaps the coordinate of absolute and relative time is effect

[RedShiftam]

On 2/26/2019 at 8:26 PM, Elendirs said:

Greetings to everyone, i am new here so please excuse any errors i did in posting this thread. ( Please also excuse my english ).

First off i would like to say i am just a young science lover with no deep understanding of anything in physics, which i love and try to explore in every way possible. 

One concept i've always been interested in is time. Initially, as everyone i suppose, i viewed time as an absolute and costant background in which events happened. After reading many books about Einstein and the theories of relativity my newtonian view changed and time started for me being "something", i immagined time as a texture of reality and of space (to be honest  i could'nt immagine time existing without space, which i always represent, probably in a wrong way, in my mind as made of Calabi–Yau extra dimensions described by string theory ). In the past couple of years however, i started questioning the existence of time itself : 

1) How can time be described without movement or changes ? A white ball in a black space with nothing else made for me impossible to describe time if not as a curvature of the einstein fabric of space-time. I would need 2 balls to describe time properly by having reference points.

2) If time exists, it would need to be composed of something let's say a particle which i call "Timeon". Well that particle of time would need to exist in a time in order to be described as existing. How can that  happen ? The same thought can be applied when viewing time in the Einstein way.

Seems to me now that time dosen't exist, it is just a model which our brain uses to describe changes. This would mean Einstein and its incredibly empirically proven theories would be a wrong description of something else , which is a big sentence to say and one aspect i can't resolve.

 

What am i missing? 

Sorry for any blasphemy i might have said, i am just trying to understand. 

Maybe the best way to understand and to have a some mental picture for what is time is the second law of thermodynamics. Consider that time maybe is not fundamental. Time measure change and if you are traveling only thru the time dimension it's a measure how you as a system change. All the stuff you are made of are little clocks and honestly i think that we can't not move only in the time  dimension. We are made of form many subsystems and if the main system don't move that doesn't mean that the subsystems doesn't move. They are moving relative to each other. If i imagine a thing which doesn't have subsystems and a freeze that thing what your thing is going to happen? I think that the concept of time disappears!

Edited March 2, 2019 by RedShiftam