Does time exist?

[paganinio]

talking to me?

[Duke]

No dude.

But i dont think you could travel though time if it doesn't exist. Severian has the right idea though, which is why im still on my lunchbreak 15 minutes on

[LucidDreamer]

I think regardless of what you think of time you have to admit there is something that separates the locations of matter besides just space and other matter: there is some reason why people get older; there is something that must be changing with speed; there is something in the denominator of the speed equation, some reason that two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space, some reason why an atom can only be in one place. I don't think the question should really be does time exist; but rather, what is time?

[Duke]

People get older because oxidants bombard our cells; is that right? something like that anyway. But its not a direct result of 'time'.

[deltanova]

You are right, time ages nothing, things age through chemical reactions. i think of time as spontanious self-organization, like the economy.

[Duke]

Time is just a way of measuring the movement of everything in the universe, its not a force that affects everything. Or at least thats what i believe.

[noz92]

i believe perfectly in time travel, and i know that theres nothing in the laws of physics that go against it, but what about the law that says that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but rather changed from one state to a nother, and this combined withe the law stating that you can't occupy 2 spaces at the same time. with these two laws, how could you exist in the past or future?

[Thales]

People get older because oxidants bombard our cells; is that right? something like that anyway. But its not a direct result of 'time'.

 

Without time the oxidants can do no bombarding. Thats the whole point, time can be viewed as an abstraction, but it is no less an absraction as energy or matter. Can you consicely define mass or energy in such a way as to 'prove' its existance/non-existance. No. Thats its the same with time, its a fundamental property in the true sense of the word. It is a consequence of the universe we live in. For those of you who are deterministic it may have 'all been done before' but 'time' is the perspective through which we view it. For non-determinists, time provides a 'new' frame upon which new possiblities can 'actuate'.

[MolecularMan14]

if time did not exist then we could never progress through it, let alone have anything to divide into seconds, minutes, and hours. It takes time for an object w/ a speed to travel from A-B, so yea, Time exists

[RICHARDBATTY]

If time did not exist it would take no time to travel therefore all movement would be at infinite speed. You would pass through every point in the universe simultaniously. Quite a sad life realy every where and no where for ever and never and ever.;o)

[ydoaPs]

If time did not exist it would take no time to travel therefore all movement would be at infinite speed. You would pass through every point in the universe simultaniously. Quite a sad life realy every where and no where for ever and never and ever.;o)

 

wrong. movement and speed are based on time.

 

"going no where for ever and ever" also implies the existance of time.

[Callipygous]

i would say time does exist. if i say this event happened at location x,y,z you can go to x,y,z and not see the event taking place. thats because your at the wrong spot in the dimension "time", you got the other three locators right, but your still at the wrong coordinates.

[Duke]

You're right; if time didn't exist of course it wouldn't take any time to travel anywhere. But maybe it doesn't anyway. I’m not trying to say I’m right, I’m just pointing out that we don’t know enough about time to argue either way. I read somewhere that pigeons see things 9 times slower than we do. And flies see things even slower apparently. How does this work if time is a universal force. We can only observe what we perceive.

[Duke]

Thats actually a good point callipygous

[noz92]

and where did you here this from?

[DreamLord]

You're right; if time didn't exist of course it wouldn't take any time to travel anywhere. But maybe it doesn't anyway. I’m not trying to say I’m right, I’m just pointing out that we don’t know enough about time to argue either way. I read somewhere that pigeons see things 9 times slower than we do. And flies see things even slower apparently. How does this work if time is a universal force. We can only observe what we perceive.

 

I've never heard the pigeon thing. I have heard that if we look at a planet light years away, we will actually be seeing that planet millions of years in the past. And the other way round. If time didn't exist, would we be seeing these planets' past?

[Thales]

I read somewhere that pigeons see things 9 times slower than we do. And flies see things even slower apparently. How does this work if time is a universal force.

 

Quite easily, think of the analogy of a computer processor. The smaller it is the faster it is, however this efficiency in 'perception' comes at a sacrifice to complexity, thus...bird brain. Flies 'brains' are a bundle of reactive nerves, their 'perception' of time is only faster because they don't think they just...fly.

 

Two puns in one post.

 

I feel so dirty.

[Sayonara]

I'm going to bet it is something to do with the firing rate of the neurons in the receptor cells, and "they see 9 times slower than we do" is the pop science edition of what's actually happening.

[RICHARDBATTY]

You're right; if time didn't exist of course it wouldn't take any time to travel anywhere. But maybe it doesn't anyway. I’m not trying to say I’m right, I’m just pointing out that we don’t know enough about time to argue either way. I read somewhere that pigeons see things 9 times slower than we do. And flies see things even slower apparently. How does this work if time is a universal force. We can only observe what we perceive.

I think its to do with the size of the brain and the time taken to proccess the visual information.

[noz92]

if some creatures see things at different speed, then we don't know that what we see is actually whats going on when we see it, or even withing the same small area of time, is that right?

[Callipygous]

Quite easily, think of the analogy of a computer processor. The smaller it is the faster it is, however this efficiency in 'perception' comes at a sacrifice to complexity, thus...bird brain.

 

i dont know much, nor have i heard anything about, different animals seeing things faster or slower. but smaller does not mean faster in computer chips, nor does simpler mean faster. a 486 chip is significantly larger than a 386(i have them both on my keychain ), close to 6 times the size. it also has many more transistors, making it more complex, not simpler.

 

computer chips get smaller because we improve technology to be able to make smaller transistors. they get faster because we make them with more transistors.

[RICHARDBATTY]

i dont know much' date=' nor have i heard anything about, different animals seeing things faster or slower. but smaller does not mean faster in computer chips, nor does simpler mean faster. a 486 chip is significantly larger than a 386(i have them both on my keychain ), close to 6 times the size. it also has many more transistors, making it more complex, not simpler.

 

computer chips get smaller because we improve technology to be able to make smaller transistors. they get faster because we make them with more transistors.[/quote']Its also to do with the switching time which is governed by the thickness of the oxide layer. Thats why the clock speeds have changed as well as the trany count.

[RICHARDBATTY]

The person who started this thread wanted to talk about the existence of time. Please see first post.

[MagicMoose]

i read from a dictionary in front of me:

the point or period appropriate to the beginning, preformance or ending of a course of action.

 

I believe that to comprehend time (or anything), we must look at it from all different angles. Well, I've been looking at the question for quite some time now, and I have to agree that it is most certainly present (just not tangible).

The way I see it is that you can't have time without motion. And with out motion (according from the definition), there is no time.

1: Imagine the universe (with something moving). Now, if you stop motion in the whole intire universe, it would be a still image...there would be no time. Imagine the universe again. This time, stop time. Now in your imaginary universe, everything would look the same as the first image you made. That's how we know that time and motion are interconnected.

2: getting off the definition of time. we can now

USE OUR BRAINS....

(something a lot of us take for granted)

look at it logically: you are in this universe, and you (hopefully) can move...since motion and time are connected, YES time exists.

3: so far we've looked at time from another's point of view...

(the dictionary), we have looked at it from a more basic and logical perspective, now look at from my view...

motion and time are connected (i said it again), but there is energy required to make motion possible. With this we have the conservation of energy that comes in to play...

i consult my dictionary again...it says...

.... total energy of an isolated system remains constant although it may be converted from one form to another.

where the energy came from to start this system is another question...

as basic as i can put it...it seems...

energy = motion

motion = time

time = energy

speed of light = infintie motion

infinite motion = infinite energy to make infinte motion

infinite motion = infinte time

E does= mc²

and blue + red = purple, or the universe pulling itself apart on the doppler radar.

 

time is endless and is irrelevant where or how it started.

THANK YOU,

[1veedo]

I think that, in quatum mechanics, eac instant in time is only a classical subcomponent of the total wavefunction of the universe. This would of course be directally connected to what we persieve as the past or what we would percieve as the future. All in all, such is entirelly static. Ie, there is not one path "in time" to take, but it all sums out to the static wave function.

 

Remember, time always enters our experience as a scalar quantity. The real reason why time appears as a scalar quantity is that our equations of motion lie in the fact that no matter how many dimensions of time may exist, they have nothing to do with directions in space.

 

f you really think about it, the past and future are merely illusions. There can be an infinite number of futures and an infinite number of pasts that could constitute the physical here and now. (Mathematically, the only thing preserved is the information of the current state which can correspond to a number of previous states.) And thus, with the conservation of information, the only actual physically real state is the "now."

 

So anybody who thinks the future is ‘out there’ is only deluding themselves.