what we know about Time

[md65536]

Physically, since nothing can go faster than SOL, the delayed observation of the object "is" the object, meaning that in our equations the only thing that physically matters is the delayed observation. The "real" position of the object, wathever that means, is out of physical interactions.

But the observation of anything only happens at your location in your present. Also to interact with anything remote, you must interact with it in the future. I don't think that this kind of rhetoric is helpful for an understanding of time... it heavily depends on what you're defining past/future etc to mean, and without being meticulous about that, it's too easy to allow hidden implied meanings to slip in where they don't belong, when trying to talk about where an object "is" in time.

 

Thinking along those lines though---that remote things are observed in a past state and interacted with in the future---it might be possible to equate time with something to do with the minimum separation between casually connected remote events or whatever. (To do so I think you'd need to find some measure of distance in all time-related processes including decays of particles where there's no such known measurement???)

 

 

_do you believe the object is static in spacetime, "existing" all the way long, represented in a spacetime diagram by its world line?

or

_do you believe that the object changed coordinates in spacetime?

Events are static in spacetime, not objects. The objects change coordinates.

 

These are just abstract representations with names people have given them. Multiple representations may validly describe the behavior of things. I don't believe either of the options you give can be shown to be incorrect.

[michel123456]

(...)The objects change coordinates.

(...)

 

Thank you.

[Klaynos]

!

Moderator Note

LittleBoPeep's comment has been split into a new thread which can be found here:

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/68332-littlebopeep-on-time/page__view__getnewpost__fromsearch__1