The Nature of Time

[scuddyx]

Time only exists if there is change.  The tick of a clock.  The beating of your heart.  A photon of light from the sun enters your eye instantaneously (zero time) in its frame of reference.  This is because it has experienced no change.  Its wave function has evolved as described by Schrodinger’s Equation – but it is only when the wave function collapses or decoheres does it experience time.   Quantum Decoherence is the key to understanding time. 

What do you think?

Edited January 14, 2020 by scuddyx
Added question to solicit replies

[studiot]

 

33 minutes ago, scuddyx said:

Time only exists if there is change.  The tick of a clock.

Would you like to explain your hypothesis in relation to this graph?

I have plotted V against a variable I have called time.

For a distance along the horizontal axis V is constant (nothing happens)

The for a second distance V is exactly zero

and so on.

 

So how does this relate to your claim time only exists when something happens,
IOW how do you quantify the  periods where nothing happens?

Also how do you identify clock ticks?
What happens between the ticks?

[Huckleberry of Yore]

Based on just my 50+ years of observation I've decided that most likely Time is real and not an illusion, but Now most certainly is.  I've pondered how to state this mathematically and what it really means.  Others will probably just say it's gibberish but I've seen a lot of that recently here. 

[StringJunky]

19 minutes ago, Huckleberry of Yore said:

Based on just my 50+ years of observation I've decided that most likely Time is real and not an illusion, but Now most certainly is.  I've pondered how to state this mathematically and what it really means.  Others will probably just say it's gibberish but I've seen a lot of that recently here. 

If it's measurable it is 'real' in the physics sense... I think.

[iNow]

1 hour ago, scuddyx said:

A photon of light from the sun enters your eye instantaneously (zero time) in its frame of reference.

Photons don't have a valid reference frame since (by definition) they're never at rest

 

1 hour ago, scuddyx said:

Time only exists if there is change. 

I think you're putting the cart before the horse here. What is change if there is no time? Without time, change itself is not possible.

 

"[Time] is one of those concepts that is profoundly resistant to a simple definition." ~C. Sagan

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/sagan.html

[Huckleberry of Yore]

34 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

If it's measurable it is 'real' in the physics sense... I think.

You are no doubt more aware than I am of the difficulties in measuring things at the quantum level.  Position versus momentum for example.  But measurement implies a specific time of what the OP refers to as "change".  Or is it time interval?  When I consider the idea of "non-nowness" I often drift into the simulation theory of the universe; there might be a link to consider.  

[Strange]

1 hour ago, scuddyx said:

Time only exists if there is change. 

Time passes even with no change. 

1 hour ago, scuddyx said:

A photon of light from the sun enters your eye instantaneously (zero time) in its frame of reference.   This is because it has experienced no change. 

There is no such frame of reference. And the photon may have changed. So wrong on two counts.

1 hour ago, scuddyx said:

What do you think?

That you are confusing the processes we use to measure the passage of time with the existence of time itself.

(But don't worry, you are not the first. This comes up on the forum pretty regularly.)

[swansont]

12 minutes ago, Strange said:

That you are confusing the processes we use to measure the passage of time with the existence of time itself.

(But don't worry, you are not the first. This comes up on the forum pretty regularly.)

Almost like clockwork

[Strange]

Nothing changes. 

[studiot]

I really don't understand this.

I omitted the diagram from my post so I went back in plenty of time and uploaded it as an edit.
I checked that the diagram was in place, but now it is gone.

 

This should help make sense of my post.

[Huckleberry of Yore]

6 hours ago, studiot said:

For a distance along the horizontal axis V is constant (nothing happens)

That clock graph isn't physically possible is it?  I've seen enough clocks on my oscilloscope to know there is ripple, undershoot, overshoot, and resonances.  You can't have infinite ramp rates, right?  Electrical engineers spend a lot of time designing to get these parameters into suitable tolerance.

[studiot]

2 minutes ago, Huckleberry of Yore said:

That clock graph isn't physically possible is it?  I've seen enough clocks on my oscilloscope to know there is ripple, undershoot, overshoot, and resonances.  You can't have infinite ramp rates, right?  Electrical engineers spend a lot of time designing to get these parameters into suitable tolerance.

So have I seen these phenomena.
But what does that have to do with the OP and my response to it?

If it makes you more comfortable, you can consider a trapezoidal shape but this part (the important bit) still stands.

Quote

For a distance along the horizontal axis V is constant (nothing happens)

The for a second distance V is exactly zero

 

[MigL]

Studiot has already mentioned this...
What is the 'time' between changes ?

[Eise]

13 hours ago, Strange said:

Time passes even with no change. 

There is no way to know that, and you know that. 😏

It is impossible to have a system with a time measuring device, and nothing happens: at least the times measuring device is changing. (A clock that never changes is pretty useless, isn't it?).

[michel123456]

15 hours ago, StringJunky said:

If it's measurable it is 'real' in the physics sense... I think.

That is an interesting comment.

Really, can you measure something that doesn't exist?

[studiot]

9 hours ago, MigL said:

Studiot has already mentioned this...
What is the 'time' between changes ?

 

1 hour ago, Eise said:

There is no way to know that, and you know that

Thank you MigL

Actually Huck has done us a service here since my second diagram illustrates this issue much more forcefully.

If we apply the definition that time does not exist in the flat sections of my first graph time becomes a sequence of disjoint points along the axis, with large gaps between.

So how do we distinguish the points where time exists I have labelled 1,2,3,4 etc ?

How do we preserve the order of these points if there is nothing in between them so they are piled up one on top of the other?

 

Moving on to the second (pun intended) diagram, we now have a sequence of isolated slashes, illustrating the same issues.

So this implies that time is discontinuous.
Does this tally with our experience?

So sorry to disagree with you Eise, but there must be some things we can deduce about the gaps.

Edited January 15, 2020 by studiot

[Eise]

9 minutes ago, studiot said:

So sorry to disagree with you Eise, but there must be some things we can deduce about the gaps.

How could one decide that there are gaps? 

[studiot]

6 minutes ago, Eise said:

How could one decide that there are gaps? 

Because there are changes between them.

This is why I numbered the changes, if you like you could make each change different so that they have distinguishing characteristics.

That might be an improvement on my model since I have made them of only two types.

Edited January 15, 2020 by studiot

[Eise]

20 minutes ago, studiot said:

Because there are changes between them.

So one has a period where there are changes, and periods there are not. So say we have a clock perfectly measuring time during the changes. But then, when there is no change, the clock does not change either. Say it says 13:03h at the end of a change period. Then, at the beginning of the 'new change period' it will still saying 13:03h. So there is no way of telling there was a gap.

The clock itself introduces the change. No change, no clock.

Edited January 15, 2020 by Eise

[Strange]

2 hours ago, Eise said:

There is no way to know that, and you know that. 😏

You are right, of course. 

My usual example is a fundamental particle like a muon, where nothing happens (internally) for about 2 microseconds. And then it decays. 

But we need some external clock to know that. But the lifetime of the muon isn’t caused by our clock. So it does seem as if, for the muon, nothing changes but time passes. 

[studiot]

31 minutes ago, Eise said:

So one has a period where there are changes, and periods there are not. So say we have a clock perfectly measuring time during the changes. But then, when there is no change, the clock does not change either. Say it says 13:03h at the end of a change period. Then, at the beginning of the 'new change period' it will still saying 13:03h. So there is no way of telling there was a gap.

The clock itself introduces the change. No change, no clock.

This does not address my comment about the order of the changes in a sequence.

So both continuity and causality are stymied.

[Eise]

17 minutes ago, Strange said:

But the lifetime of the muon isn’t caused by our clock.

But it isn't caused by time either. Causality is a relationship between events. One event can cause another, and the cause precedes the effect. That means we need the concept of time to describe causal relationships. But time itself causes nothing: it is a concept we need to describe our observations.

[StringJunky]

1 hour ago, michel123456 said:

That is an interesting comment.

Really, can you measure something that doesn't exist?

There are lots of things that are just manifestations of a mind, like the colour pink, gods, aether etc and we can distinguish whether something is real/physical by whether it is measurable or not.

[swansont]

3 hours ago, Eise said:

There is no way to know that, and you know that. 😏

It is impossible to have a system with a time measuring device, and nothing happens: at least the times measuring device is changing. (A clock that never changes is pretty useless, isn't it?).

It's also impossible to have a system where nothing changes (at the quantum level), so isn't this all moot?

The "nothing changes" idea has to be applied to a very small system, which is making the argument that time isn't a universal concept, and I don't think that's the argument people want to be making. Even though time is relative, if it exists it's got to exist everywhere (all places in all frames), or you have to come up with a good explanation of why it wouldn't.

 

[Strange]

6 minutes ago, swansont said:

It's also impossible to have a system where nothing changes (at the quantum level), so isn't this all moot?

On the other hand, in GR time is not a thing that “passes”; there is no change, it represents the universe as a static 4D manifold. 

So, as so often, it largely comes down to what one means by “time” (and “change” and “real” ...)