#H1-574. 5hP4. MFK, 8 h ago: i am somewhat disappointed: To read your paragraph, it feels "spontaneous creation" is as mysterious as "godly creation": out of nothing: but what alternative we have but never able to reason then from what from (ad infinitum). I wonder: From what and From when? What does grammar call like this unanswerable questions? That is, the answers belong to some other Reason (version or type 2) that my histology/body cannot understand?

Then cyclic time: rhythmic, of Kalidasa: but in the longest term, can linearity and cyclicity merge? I think there's no other way time will remain simple enough.

Then still time may want also to be "particulate". To accomodate this (eg Plank time) (and particle is the same as wave! We can relax) how?

Again then, time may be yet another face of "matter". Will we able to speculate (how reasonising this word now sounds to me!) what cyclicity-and-matter?

I think if i find any of my comparisons(analogising) is untenable, then even the starting premise may not be tenable!

I think, if something appears to somebody as logical, then there is at least some probablity that it has some comparability to truth.

Well, I wouldn't take Stephen Hawking's word for anything, I've found so many errors of his. In this case, it would be wrong to assume that time is cyclic (I'm not sure if Hawking actually said this) because to infer such a thing would mean that the exact same thing would be happening again after the completion of every cycle, and by that I mean all the events that had transpired before. You might be able to say that the universe has a cycle of expansion, contraction and expansion again, but to say that time is cyclic would be implying that every event within those expansion and contracting phases would be happening again. You can compare it to the seasons. Seasons are cyclical but they always transpire in new years...

Current science (Big Bang Theory) does not say that the Universe was created out of nothing. If one assume that the Universe was created out of nothing using some mathematics then it is assuming that the Universe emerges from mathematics and this is not nothing.

Before science and philosophy, before the 6th century BC, nobody talked about time as container of events as having an existence of its own. Philosophy invented this notion of time as existing in itself. Philosophy then later questioned this assumption. Leibniz posited that time is relation between events, both do not exist in itself. General Relativity goes in this direction. There is also the question of the difference between subjective time , the way we experience change, and the measured time of physics (clock time). Clock time does not flow which is an essential attribute of subjective time. Subjective time is in the now while objective time has not a privilege time. Most of physical equations are valid if the sign on the time variable is reverse. While the subjective time flow direction is fixed. Objective time has changed with the development of physics and since Newton all the changes went in the direction of diminishing the differences with subjective time.

While talking about ancient history and philosophers such as Leibniz (who got much of their philosophy from religion and not experimental science) may be quaint, it offers nothing towards the resolution of the questions of time. I think it's a stretch to say that GR goes towards any position of Leibniz as GR allows for time dilation near or within strong gravitational fields.

Objective and subjective are mostly psychological terms. It is more accurate to speak of objective and local reference frames. Confusing the two types of "subjective time" is problematic, as one veers towards the physiological/psychological and the other is physics, that is if the conversation is supposed to be about physics. Duration dilation is not the same as time dilation, as duration dilation is the dilation of psychological subjective time and time dilation is the dilation of physical time in a local reference frame. Any time one is in a reference frame that is dilated, that reference frame is outside of those which could be viewed as more "objective" because they are not being dilated.

The equations that are cited in physics, that work whether the time variable is reversed or not, are akin to running a movie forward and backward and stating that the same images are there regardless. The difference is that if time itself were to reverse, it would be the end of everything because nothing new would be happening except for all that had happened previously, recurring in reverse. The time reversible equations aren't seen happening in the real, macroscopic world. They are exclusively in quantum mechanics.

I think that very much depends on our perspective. The initial ideas about time were derived from man's referring to himself as well as from his observation of Nature. In the former case, time is a (more or less) linear phenomenon taking place in the interval stretching from birth to death. As far as humans are concerned, there was nothing before and there will be nothing after. If we observe the earth and the grass growing on its surface, it is not too far fetched to talk about cyclical time. There is the eternal alternating from spring to summer to autumn to winter. The grass grows up, and dies. Exactly the same blades of grass spruce up in the springtime, they have the same biochemical content and they form exactly the same kind of straw when the grass dries and dies. And this repeats again and again.

@Igor:

As a physics conceptual theorist involved with temporal mechanics, it very much depends on keeping the perspective based in physics. How Man used to view time is completely irrelevant because we have new, more accurate models that demonstrate how time works.

The biological processes that you describe have nothing to do with the nature of time. There are just events that happen in a particular climate cycle. Those events can be accelerated or thwarted without having any effect at all on time itself, and often are. The blades of grass that grow up are nit, in fact, the exact same blades of grass, though they may be from the same root. Likewise, other plants can spring up around them that weren't there the previous spring. The cycle we're describing is a biological cycle in response to a climate cycle and neither one has any effect on time nor it is locked to the passage of time. That's why spring sometimes comes sooner or later, or any of the other seasons as well. Other events, such as the Earth revolving around the sun or lunar cycles that may be simultaneous with certain seasons, will happen right on schedule while the season on Earth could be late or early.

It's important, in time research, to distinguish between physics, philosophy and fantasy.

For the relevance of some of the ideas of Leibniz see for example the talk of Julian Barbour on Shape Dynamics and Genearal Relativity at the perimeter Institute: http://pirsa.org/12050050 .

In the language of theoretical physics, time is like any other physical parameter. In

particular, nothing in physical equations that deal with time says that the past is more

certain than the future, just like nothing in physical equations that deal with space says

that the left is more certain than the right, or just like that nothing in physical equations

that deal with temperature says that a lower temperature is more certain than a higher

temperature. In other words, nothing in these equations says that time, unlike other

variables, has a property of “lapsing” or “flowing”.

It is difficult even to imagine how one could express the

lapse of time in a mathematical language. It may still seem reasonable to believe that time does lapse in

agreement with our subjective experience, even though we do not understand it very well

from the physical point of view.

General relativity suggests a picture of the block time,

where time is nothing but one of the coordinates on the static 4-dimensional manifold.

According to this picture, the universe does not evolve with time. Instead, the universe simply is,

extended in 4 dimensions, one of them being called “time”. Both the “future” and the

“past”, as well as the “presence”, are there, without any of them being less certain or less

real then the other. Moreover, any attempt to define “future”, “past”, and “presence”

in an observer independent way destroys the mathematical structure of the theory in an

artificial and arbitrary manner.

Most

physicists, even many relativists, do not find such a bloc time picture acceptable.

Barbour is a theoretical physicist which tries to find a common ground at the base of general relativity and quantum physics. His approach is in line with the tradition of Leibniz and Ernst Mach of relational conception of space. See www.platonia.com

I was able to analyze Barbour's work and destroy it on every point that matters. Platonia is a fantasy land derived from Barbour's over reliance on Plato and Kant and Leibniz and motivated by his own "child-like" (his words not mine) inability to accept that which he can't see. Barbour is psychologically predisposed to fear time and any rigorous review of his book, The End of Time, will offer up exactly those details. It was in reviewing Barbour's work that I began to realize how much BS there is in philosophy and that philosophy has actually stood in the way of a proper understanding of the nature of time.

Even Lee Smolin, who used to support Barbour, now feels differently and is convinced that time is real.

Dear Larry:

I think you're referring to light cones. The observer doesn't see into the future with the light cone, it's just that the future like cone sets the boundary for where the observer (or whatever) can move into the future without going FTL or resorting to time travel or teleportation. Look up Minkowski space-time diagram...

Dear Larry:

Now what you're describing is something different. But that isn't a function of a light cone. There are players during a football game, that due to their frame of reference can see that another player is going to get tackled before he does, many times. However, their future light cones are basically the same.

What is time? Is it linear or cyclic?

Neither - the reification of the useful fiction "time" simply does not exist. What exists (what are present in the world) are neuro-physically developed "timing humans" and "other timed objects."

Our human forebears selected "events" (or more properly - certain causal-eventuating objects) from amongst the plethora of the available perceived interactions that were important to them (summer and winter, the predictable "return" of the sun each day, the changing shape of the moon in the night sky) and used their knowledge of the "heavenly behaviour" of such objects as a method for communicating their impressions of when certain events happened (fourteen moons "ago" since our son was born) and when certain events will happen (snow will likely come after another instance of a full moon.etc. (We will meet two moons from now when the sun is overhead.)

They looked up and noticed that the reappearance of the sun and the moon was reliably regular and used those uniform re-positional spatial changes as the basis for their measurement of "change."

More modern humans made mechanical instruments (clocks, etc.) which mirror the phases of the earth and moon in relation to the sun as seen by humans from the moving platform we call earth as we orbit our nearest star.

Of course the concept "change" no more exists than "time." What exist are timed, changing objects, (using the sun, etc. as the regulator) including changing human objects which grow increasingly wrinklier as they go through life "timing" themselves and the other objects (of which they are aware) in their interaction with other objects.

*Time* does not start when forces (super-gravity) and matter procreate themselves into the universe spontaneously. The *human notion* of what they, in various languages, tag as *time* "started" (became a useful fiction ) when the various extinct hominids or other primates that resemble modern humans reached a stage when they were able to distinguish or experientially perceive definable existential "periods" in the continuum which they divided into "past" and "present." They called this sensory faculty of distinguishing the reoccurring or expected behaviour of causal objects from the unexpected behaviour of causal objects "time. There are no chronological interstices in the continuum despite the creation of nanoseconds and other such utile non-chronic innovations. "Duration" like *instantaneity" does not exist - only changing durational matergy exists.

We have merely inherited the temporal ordering of our early ancestors when they sought out objects which presented what they perceived as a pattern of reoccurring events which would be useful for structuring their daily lives. Though we do NEED such useful fiction, that does not mean that we should award the fiction of "time" a real ontological status, but such is the nature of these various folkish forms of idealism that they continue to befuddle scientists.

Quotes from the "The Hebrew Concept of Time" by Ronnie Littlejohn

When early philosophers asked about time, they sensed that it had something to do with change. But how can something change? How can something be one way at one time and some other way at another time, yet still be the same time? They wondered whether the past could be changed or the future predicted. They even speculated about time travel in which one might visit the past or the future.

…

in a deep difference between the way the Hebrews understood time and the way the Greeks thought about it. The Hebrew mind thought in concrete terms and did not engage in the sort of abstract speculation we know so well from the Greeks. Just as the Hebrews did not speculate about famous Greek questions such as "What is truth?" or "What is justice?" neither did they offer arguments or theories about the question "What is time?"

When we study the Old Testament, … Time was related to an event that took place and how that event was related to something else that had occurred. Time was not an abstract something over and above events. Herein lay the basic difference between the Hebrews and the Greeks.

This difference may be seen by correcting our language. The Greeks might say, "Time is the medium for God's saving acts." The Hebrews might say, "Time is the sequence of God's saving acts." For the Hebrews, there was no time that existed as a substance or force or dimension, as the Greek sentence implies. There were only real events that occurred, and men measured and marked life by their relationships to these. Unlike a modern American, a Hebrew would not say, "I don't have enough time" as though time were like so many coins in a pocket or so much liquid in a glass. Hebrews did not engage in discussions about whether time really existed or if they could "feel" time. The reason is clear. Time was not a thing or object for the Hebrews of the Old Testament. The Old Testament has no general word for "time" in the abstract sense at all. Neither does it have special terms for past, present, and future. The most common word for "time" means the moment or point at which something happened, or will happen, for example, "Behold, about this time tomorrow, I will send a very heavy hail" (Ex. 9:18, NASB).

For the ancient Hebrews, things did not happen "in time." Things happened and the happenings were time.

…

Another way of seeing this difference is to notice that the Hebrews developed no idea of eternity as timelessness. This was a Greek notion. The Hebrews had no idea that there could be life and experience without time. For them, life was time, or better "to live was time." There was no time where there were no life events, and no life events where there was no time. In the Old Testament, life was humanity's form of existence (Job 1:21; Ps. 90:3-12) and this was time.

One could characterize the difference between how the Hebrews understood time and how we do by saying that time for us is "chronological" and time for them was "qualitative.' In the Old Testament, events and persons were differentiated and arranged, not by their position in chronological sequence to each other, but according to the impact of their occurrence.

The Hebrews were impressed by the weightiness or significance of things and people, not by how many ticks on a clock went by while doing something. This explains why when scholars study the Old Testament, matters that are revealed by their research to be widely separated with reference to time (our definition) can, if their content coincides, be identified and regarded as simultaneous by the Old Testament (because of their view of time). The worshiper experienced past acts of salvation, such as the exodus, as contemporary and happening right then, even if the exodus occurred in the past.

…

Time for the Hebrews was about effort and achievement. People did things. They wrote, played, traveled, slept, dreamed, performed ceremonies, went to war, and prayed. God did things too. Time consisted of the story of these events, and it had no existence beyond these. To make the most of time probably meant something like living your fife so that others mark their lives and tell their stories in reference to your actions. In the Hebrew mind, the real question was not, "What is the best use of my time right now?" but rather, "What is the best use of my life right now?"

================

It is only very recently that this relational notion of time is being formalized in fundamental physics in order to unify quantum theory to general relativity.

@Jud Evans:

" the reification of the useful fiction "time" simply does not exist. What exists (what are present in the world) are neuro-physically developed "timing humans" and "other timed objects."

That's cute. Now prove it. I can show how time functions as a physical dimension along with space. I devised an experiment and did it, making predictions on what the outcome should be. It worked exactly. We didn't even use clocks to accomplish it. If my theory had been wrong, the experiment would have failed. It was done with the participation of a physics class at a high school.

The idea that time is a fiction is baseless b.s. that relies on what people used to think along time ago. People before there were planes, rockets and spacecraft. In other words, not as advanced or knowledgeable as we are today. That makes their point of view irrelevant if you want to do advanced physics in which time is a factor.

You don't have to agree with me, but you can't say that your position is a fact based on how reality works, because you're ignoring that by concentrating on what ignorant ancients humans were thinking.

" The reification of the useful fiction "time" simply does not exist. What exists (what are present in the world) are neuro-physically developed "timing humans" and "other timed objects."

Marshall: That's cute. Now prove it.

Jud: No - you prove it Marshall. You are the one making the claim that it exists - not me. For me " time" is a useful fiction. You claim it exists - now let us see your evidence. Though the entification "time" is undoubtedly fictively more useful for our daily lives and for more serious academic and scientific pursuits than Disney's English speaking Mickey Mouse (which is a prosopopoeia created mainly for its children's entertainment value) a cartoon character which many young boys and girls believe actually exists.

The reificative reverie "time" is similar in that it is another "let's pretend" conceptual convenience, which sadly, many grown-ups also continue to believe actually exists in the fictive flesh, so to speak, or whatever turns out to be the nature of the actual functioning material physical property you claim you can prove exists, such as its mass, length, density, etc. or the combination thereof, regarded as the fundamental measure or as one of a set of fundamental measures of "time's " physical quantity.

Physics can still be conducted using the existential changes in timed objects (the celestial trio) as the relational factor in order to discuss or describe changing objects in the continuum without harbouring a naive belief in the actual existence of such conceptual contrivances. The neurological concept "Time" is a handy transcendentalist tool or "let's pretend" or "postural perhaps" factored in to make life easy and to avoid a constant reference to the actual orbital pas de trois of the of the heavenly hoofers - the derivative foundational causal objects chosen by our forebears to act as the mensural interactive models, involved in event-dependant i.e. the moon, earth and sun.

Subsequently the solar-based objective-event differentiation evolved into an abstractive extrapolation from the objects involved to the final reification of the predictive behaviour of the celestial bodies themselves. Various single word periphrasis-avoiders were invented: "Time, temps, Zeit, tid, aika, χρόνος, etc.

The abstractive distancing was achieved with the invention of water-clocks, hourglasses, sundials, candle clocks and incense sticks and later mechanical clocks. The Ancient Egyptians divided the day into two 12-hour periods, and used large obelisks to track the movement of the Sun.

In the Theaetetus, Plato says that "But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the water of the clepsydra driving him on". http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/plato_theaetetus.htm

In Japan, a geisha was paid for the number of senkodokei (incense sticks) that had been consumed while she was present, a practice which continued until 1924.

Today, if the difference between the event of a spatially relocating train leaving London and the event of it arriving at Birmingham is given as one hour, then that is directly related to the turning earth accomplishing one twenty-fourth of it daily rotation. As Louis points out in his fascinating and instructive contribution, "Time for the ancient Jews [Jud:very sensibly] related to an event (Jud: and *events* always include material objects) that took place and how that event was related to something else that had occurred. Time was not an abstract something over and above events. Herein lay the basic difference between the Hebrews and the Greeks".

For me the main contribution provided by the Greeks took place in the pre-Socratic period before the Socratic and Platonic reificational rot set in - but that is another story.

You seem to believe that just because this particular *time" abstraction is NAMED that is exists (shades of the Russian Imiaslavie sect who believed with Plato that , "the name of an object exists since before the object itself does, then the object exists.) and further confuse the abstraction "time" with clocks, which are merely objects used to (as near as possible) simulate to behaviour of the turning earth as it orbits the sun and the moon in relation to its monthly orbit around the Earth.

In the meanwhile I look forward in eager anticipation to you showing me how time functions as a physical dimension along with space. But in order to do that of course you must first prove that "Time" has this "physical dimension" you claim and outline its physical dimension, size, weight, colour, temperature, atomic structure, etc.

Of course if you CAN prove that abstraction "Time" exists (rather than the human abstractor, or the changing, behaving or functioning abstracted material object) the I will alert The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences which awards the Nobel Prize in Physics to prepare the red carpet for your arrival.

BTW - "Reality" does not exist either - only that which is real exists and that does not include abstractive hypostasization. Unless of course you prove differently and a flight to Kungliga slottet in The Venice of the North in sunny Sverige is in the offing? ;-)

Jud Evans

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/study.htm

@ Louis

Thank you Louis for the quotes from Ronnie Littlejohn's "The Hebrew Concept of Time."

The Hebrews always were ahead of the game, practical, sensible, with their feet very much on the ground in matters of importance. As for the Greeks, although they were in the vanguard of so many areas of human endeavour and bequeathed the human race with so much that modern man takes for granted, not EVERYTHING that they left us was of the same astonishing quality.

The UNACKNOWLEDGED development of abstraction as useful fiction was one such negative inheritance, for the imprintation from childhood with the Socratic/Platonic concept of abstraction as quasi-materialistic "things" allied to Plato's warped doctrine of the existence of the "heteron" has done serious damage to philosophical ontology.

Western ontology has been seriously damaged by Plato's wrongful identification of every "non-being" (note scare-quotes) as an existing heteron, i. e., as a "being" (again note scare-quotes) characterised only by its difference from another existing being. For example that "nothing" exists as an "opposite" of "some thing" hence ontological errors like: "There is "nothing" in the fridge," or Hamlet's confusion that there is a state of "non-being, etc. The philosopher of Nazism, the " double-talking mystifier who philosophized in a meaningless language of his own making" Heidegger amplified this absurdity with his infamous "Nothing nothings," ('Das Nichts selbst nichtet' .)

It is a curious fact of language that even the very mention of a so-called "non-existent" instantiates the concept of such a will-of-the-wisp in the human mind and introduces a dimension of phantom concrecity.

But there is there is no state of ubiety or presence - an object either exists or it does not exist. There is no heteronic (alternative) state of "not existing" and consequently no state of existing as a stative alternative or ἕτερον (heteron - other.) There is no Platonist existential emporium floating in the sky like some zabaglione shaped Zeppelin from which abstracta floats like thistledown from the dirigible to earth to land of the shoulders of abstractionists as de-naturalised dandruff for conversational purposes - abstraction has been admitted into the lexicon as ready-to-hand metaphysical make-believe for purposes of existential easement .

Compare the word "energy." Energy like all abstraction is merely a reification of the activity of a perceived process into a thing? Similar to the way that ’love’ is reified into a quasi-object, when plainly it is only the human objects we characterise as lovers who exist?

'It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. (Feynman. 1987)

And yes, someone else believes that to be true.

"Energy is an abstract concept invented by physical scientists in the nineteenth century to describe quantitatively a wide variety of natural phenomena. (Faires & Simmang. 2002)

So what is going on in our brains when we reify concepts like "time?"

Here are three possible accounts of the neurological processes that generate reification:

1. Dissimilar or analogous generalisations are conflated into an exteriorised linguistic particular.

2. A multiplicity of complex states of affairs is instantiated as an individual concretised universal.

3. Conceptual elements of varying complexity are thingified into a singular useful abstraction.

In plain words - an object cannot be in a different state to something which does not exist because not existing is not a state to which an object can be different from or other.

Thus in spite of the genius of Parmenides who insisted that and non-being (to mae on") "that which does not exist" cannot be spoken of if "nothing" cannot be, it cannot be the object of thought either.

Thanks to Plato and company. such is the nature of the erroneous ontological legacy left to us by the Greeks.

Jud Evans

The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy

I am of the opinion that 'time' is synonymous only with 'change'. Simple definition, I know, but my philosophy is that life and Nature are simpler than we would like to think since the industrial revolution. I don't care for complexity; it ruins my appreciation of most things. If time is only the 'change of a system', then to be accurate when discussing the system, one must introduce complexity to 'interrogate the changes that are occurring'. This is where complexity belongs, but it would not alter the interchange of 'time' with 'change', therefore my taste for simplicity is satisfied.

Although the Greek introduced this false conception of time as a container of events. The real shift in that direction was the invention of analytical geometry by Descartes. Because for the first time in history, it was possible to create a spatial parameter t from a clock and to treat it in symmetrical way as the other spatial parameters as if time is space. Bergson has explained the fallacy of treating the clock-time as time. It is a spatialization of time. The invention of special relativity has only push further this spatial conception of time to its ultimate and natural conclusion. Whitehead has explained that most scientists attribute realities to mathematical concepts which he called false concreteness. This is a platonic trap that it is very easy to fall into.

Dear Brandon, Larry and Louis.

Brandon writes:

I am of the opinion that 'time' is synonymous only with 'change'. Simple definition, I know, but my philosophy is that life and Nature are simpler than we would like to think since the industrial revolution. I don't care for complexity; it ruins my appreciation of most things.

Hi Brandon:

If I may I would like to suggest that whilst you are perfectly right to note the synonymity between the abstractions “time” and “change” – “change” itself does not exist as an entity any more than “time” does. What actually exist are changing objects, those chosen as an existential entablature upon which the human measurement of concatenational “events” is founded (earth, sun and moon) and all the other material objects that humans time using the ever-changing but predictable behaviour objects of the selected mensural system.

What do you think about my rephrasing of this nomenclature? I hope that you might consider it more ontologically precise?

Larry writes:

Jud: I liked your thistledown metaphor. One question: Do you think that the attempt to prove that flying a clock around the world to compare it with a synchronized statonary one in order to show that their times would the be different (and thus that time is something of a reified commodity in keeping with Einstein's theories) was a poorly setup experiment or even a hoax.

Hi Larry:

I find the entire “time dilation theory,” which claims that there is an actual difference of elapsed time between two “contemporaneous” events on the one hand rather amusing and on the other hand rather depressing in that it evidences one of my childhood heroes Einstein getting something terribly, terrribly wrong.

There is no such thing either in: “an elapsed version” or “a current version,” or “a future version, or “a slowed-down version” of “time.” It is quite obvious to me that what is being affected is not TIME in a case of the two observers usually introduced with one guy in a space-station moving around the earth, and one down below, or as two passengers in two space ships passing each other at high speed and observing each other’s clocks through the port-holes.

It occurs to me and my hunch is that the claim is wrong that one guy returns to earth after three months in “space” 0.007 seconds younger than his friend who spent three months in Las Vegas smoking and stuffing himself with unhealthy food, is “younger” than his pal and that (organically speaking) the earthbound fatty will have rendered himself “organically older* (physically more degenerated) by more than a fraction of a second.

Any slowing of off-earth mechanical clocks or other forms of horological equipment with a concomitant decrease in rate of of the aging process in the spaceman is not caused by some spurious metaphysical bogeyman called “time,” but is the result of atomic/cellular slowdown in the body-meat due to the diminution of the force of gravity when existing at a height above earth of between 205 to 255 miles.

However (and this is a big “however:”)

(1)

I guard myself against falling into the trap of equating the slowing down of Big Ben just because someone forgot to wind it up, or the slowing down of an atomic clock in “space” just because it has been affected by a lessoning of gravity, with the earth-moon-sun system of calculating any other events undergone by any other of the causal objects on earth as proof that (a) there is such a “thing” as “time” and (b) that such an abstractive reification is capable of operating at two (or more) speeds – for it is just a fiction anyway!

(2) Causal objects exist in the cosmos as changing objects as Brandon has already mentioned (though my form of words is slightly different.) For me there are NO objects in the cosmos which are incapable of change – for otherwise, in accordance with the existential imperative, they would not exist in the first place. All objects undergo constant modification and as the Chinese noodle-maker said: “No changee – no existee!”

(3) Are we to be conned into believing that there is a spooky dimension called “time” that can be slowed down by stopping smoking cigarettes and/or sticking to a healthy diet or exposing ourselves to a lessoned form of gravity? It is not time that delays the ticking clock or the death and replacement of human cells, it is the matergic meaty object itself whether the person concerned is an astonaut, or the object is a clock, or the venting mechanism of the on-board toilet.

Louis writes:

Although the Greek introduced this false conception of time as a container of events. The real shift in that direction was the invention of analytical geometry by Descartes. Because for the first time in history, it was possible to create a spatial parameter t from a clock and to treat it in symmetrical way as the other spatial parameters as if time is space.

Jud:

Yes Louis, I agree, Descartes was guilty of much more that the metaphysical “Body and Mind Mess.”

“Space” is yet another reification. It does not exist. That is no such thing as the *vacuum of space.” The cosmic immensity consists of matergy (energised matter – visible and dark) in various gradations of mass – its like minestrone soup – thick and lumpy in parts and more like an unseeable dark watery gruel in ALL other parts (excuse the crude metaphor.)

We live is a materialistic self-governing universal imperium. A slower but similar Darwinesque struggle for the survival of inanimate objects (elemental abundancy) goes on, accept that in the case of the inert matter there is no personification-style awareness not even of the impingemental conatus with which it is involved. Hydrogen atoms are the current dominant element as far as abundance is concerned.

Louis: Bergson has explained the fallacy of treating the clock-time as time. It is a spatialization of time. The invention of special relativity has only push further this spatial conception of time to its ultimate and natural conclusion. Whitehead has explained that most scientists attribute realities to mathematical concepts which he called false concreteness. This is a platonic trap that it is very easy to fall into.

Jud:

Bravo Louis! It seems that you and I share exactly the same position on the question of “time” and “special relativity” and “mathematics.”

Greetings to all.

@Jud:

This is how physics is done:

1. Einstein said that both time and space are malleable. Time dilation suggests time distortions as gravity is the distortion of space-time itself.

2. If time is a dimension as we know space is, then there must be a way to detect it.

3. If there is not enough room to fit something within a certain space, such as a box, the the lid won't shut. How can we tell if something can't fit within a certain dimension of time? If time is real, this should be detectable.

4. The corollary between space and time is asymmetrical. Whereas you need more space to fit something that's too big for space, you need a faster time frame to fit everything within a segment of time.

Experiment: If time doesn't exist, the velocity of various objects will not effect their appearance in a video of a typical frame rate. They will all "fit", appear clear. If time does exist, the objects with enough velocity will not only be blurred but will become fainter the faster they move until the fastest will seem like they're almost not there at all. They will not "fit".

http://physicsintrouble.iwarp.com/NLD_GHHS_time_test.html

5. The outcomes of the experiment are supported by the fact that a speeding car will look like a blur as it streaks past another that's standing still, however if the other catches the first, the first will look like it's not moving in relation to the second. There is a direct relationship between time and velocity as there is between space and size. This is natural as time is the dimension where events take place and the fasted natural event is a photon traveling at the speed of light. At the beginning of the universe, space traveled faster than the speed of light and time with it, which only makes sense, since in order for light to exist in space, the space would have to already be there to accommodate it and thus time as well.

Time is where events take place, first and foremost. The measurement of time is a secondary process invented by Man and the stoop where those obsessed with thinking, for the sake of thinking, stop to sit and ponder philosophical musings, not having the ability to see that the big picture on a higher level. The big picture is more and more provable every day as the technology to capture smaller and smaller slices of events gets better. And those slices are showing events happening in time.

@Jud - Of course I mean that "time is change" as a reduction for simple memorization, like the fact that Einstein's work boils down to Newton's under derivation, despite the fact that Newton's is "simpler" in concept. My point is that if time and change are synonymous then there should be some sort of definition of a "change" in Nature that represents everything *about* Nature (all of it's complexity) without the passage of time, as long as the passage of time is (a) understood and (b) accounted for. Like a system of equations that represent time without allowing it to pass, but with consequences to the system if it does. I can't think of another way to represent time except as a very specific type of change, since "change" is a much easier concept to define than "time" IMHO.

Brandon: In most physics theory, time is simply represented by a parameter t. And changes are presented by time derivative. It cannot be simpler than that. It is this simplicity that allowed the tremendous success of the physical sciences in the last 300 hundred years. But although this concept that there is a dimension of time has/is/will be usefull, it is not true in an absolute sense and is probably blocking the way for the unification of physics. You are right, articulating physics in terms of change will bring us much more closer to reality.

Marshall Writes

This is how physics is done:

1. Einstein said that both time and space are malleable. Time dilation suggests time distortions as gravity is the distortion of space-time itself.

Jud:

Einstein was wrong – it is humanly-timed, spatially situated, changing objects that exist – not “time” or “space.” Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity did not rubbish the traditionalist idea of “time” as a universal constant (though he mistakenly thought that they did.)

What he actually achieved (without knowing it) was to to replace the traditional concept of linear “time” with a brilliantly conceived, but only partially understood explanation of the cosmic fact that the existential status of mobile, changing objects are not only directionally affected as they pass by a larger body and are exposed to the influence of gravity, but that the natural, inherent dynamic change from one existential state or phase to another varies depending upon the distance from and period of exposure to the other mass and that the rate of change of own molecular and cellular meaty mass is not confined to a universal constant.

2. If time is a dimension as we know space is, then there must be a way to detect it.

Jud:

“Time” is not a “dimension” it is an undetectable cognitive charade. The myth known as “time” has no size or dimension, nor can a fiction that does not exist be measurable, or be used to measure anything. The canard “time” cannot be used as a reference point against which other things can be evaluated.

What CAN be used and IS used as reference points for changing objects are the predictable relational changes between the earth – moon and sun and the gravitational effects exerted on and and subject to these and other objects. The ancient fiction “time” does not constitute the phoney “fourth dimension.”

Such juvenilia is an unscientific, outdated semantic cop-out – an ontologically louche umbrella term under which metaphorically speaking, "Outdated unknowingness crouches in order to avoid the light of knowledge".

Marshall:3. If there is not enough room to fit something within a certain space, such as a box, then the lid won't shut. How can we tell if something can't fit within a certain dimension of time? If time is real, this should be detectable.

Jud:

Your reasoning is ontologically haywire. I only employ the term *time* because I have no alternative, in the same way that I am forced to use the term “God” if I wish to discuss religion. Your view appears to mirror certain theological beliefs. Your question: “How can we tell if something can't fit within a certain dimension of time? If time is real, this should be detectable,” demonstrates that what you write here is not scientific physics but a misunderstanding redolent of medieval monks hundreds of years ago chatting in a monastery garden.

Marshall: 4. The corollary between space and time is asymmetrical.

Jud:

Even to mention the word corollary to suggest an inference that follows directly from the proof of another fiction to another is amusing - but In guess you are actually being serious?.

Marshall:

Whereas you need more space to fit something that's too big for space, you need a faster time frame to fit everything within a segment of time.

Jud: There is no symmetrical correspondence or lack of symmetrical correspondence (asymmetry) whatsoever between the “time” and “space” fictive fabrications because neither exist. Only timed objects can only be spatially detected, identified, compared and described in relation to other known spatially existent objects. With regard to the need for any catenulate sequence of events to be distinguished – that entails the earth–moon–sun based mensural system, as represented by objects known as watches and clocks,etc.

Marshal: Experiment: If time doesn't exist, the velocity of various objects will not effect their appearance in a video of a typical frame rate.

Jud:

Yes it will! The velocity of various objects will be recorded differently depending upon the camera lens, the shutter speed and the available illumination and the type of object. Moving objects will not be detected clearly if the object speed – camera shutter speed relationship is inadequate.

Marshall:

They will all "fit", appear clear. If time does exist, the objects with enough velocity will not only be blurred but will become fainter the faster they move until the fastest will seem like they're almost not there at all. They will not "fit".

Jud: Incorrect. Firstly it is not the objects which will be blurred and will become fainter the faster they move - it is the images as captured by the camera with the slow shutter speed. There is no question of an object “fitting into time" any more than one could “fit” a unicorn with a bridle and a pork-pie hat with a hole in it for the horn – for “time,” like unicorns, does not exist. If the moving object’s velocity is too great for a slow shutter-speed camera to detect correctly the image will appear blurred or may not ever be registered at all.

Marshall:

http://physicsintrouble.iwarp.com/NLD_GHHS_time_test.html

5. The outcomes of the experiment are supported by the fact that a speeding car will look like a blur as it streaks past another that's standing still, however if the other catches the first, the first will look like it's not moving in relation to the second.

Jud:

The outcomes of the experiment are not supported by the above which has nothing at all to do with the fiction “time” but is explainable in perfectly rational and uncomplicated physical terms without any departure into the wild-blue-yonder of transcendentalisms.

Marshall:

There is a direct relationship between time and velocity as there is between space and size.

Jud:

There is absolutely zilch “relationship” between the abstractions: “time” and “velocity,” nor between the fictions: “space” and “size,” for they are all phenomenological phantoms or human creations in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account, but invented, initially to avoid periphrasis and ambage, but sadly in many people’s hands used (either deliberately of naively) to cause ontological mayhem and arrive at erroneous and sometimes preposterous occult conclusions.

Physicists must learn to deal with physical objects – not fictions – leave them to Walt Disney and others. Start addressing real concrete objects like: timed objects, moving objects, spatially situated objects and sized objects instead of the reified conceptual cartoons: “time, velocity, space” and “size.”

Marshall:

This is natural as time is the dimension where events take place and the fasted natural event is a photon travelling at the speed of light.

Jud:

The is no fantasy “dimension” called “time” where “events take place.” Eventuating objects are present in science labs, market places, city halls, peoples homes, within atoms, rabbit warrens, airoplanes, forest clearings, termite nests and uncountable other locales throughout the cosmos

Marshall:

At the beginning of the universe, space traveled faster than the speed of light and time with it,

Jud:

Primitive abstractions like “space,” dating back to early hominids didn’t/doesn’t “travel” anywhere – particularly with another fantasy existential equestrian old trooper called “time” clinging to its metaphysical mane for grim death.

Marshall:

…which only makes sense, since in order for light to exist in space, the space would have to already be there to accommodate it and thus time as well.

Jud:

There is no such thing as empty “space” waiting to accommodate photonic light and “time.”

The tern “space” is simply a useful fiction which helps to describe areas containing unsensed material from the sensed.

Marshall:

Time is where events take place, first and foremost.

Jud:

So the fiction “time” is a location where events take place? And what pray is “an event” if not a timed energised matergic object or objects undergoing impingement? “Action” does not exist anywhere in the cosmos – only the inorganic and organic actors which are materially present in the world .

One does not see “ballet” on the stage, one sees moving flesh and blood ballet dancers existing in ever-changing stylised modalities, acting out dance routines to the accompaniment of music generated by man-made material instruments, which interfere with the air, creating timed keyboard sound events producing audible waves, which vibrate the ear-drums of the audience without a single abstraction or unicorn in sight.

Marshall:

The measurement of time is a secondary process invented by Man and the stoop where those obsessed with thinking, for the sake of thinking, stop to sit and ponder philosophical musings, not having the ability to see that the big picture on a higher level. The big picture is more and more provable every day as the technology to capture smaller and smaller slices of events gets better. And those slices are showing events happening in time.

Jud:

Absolutely incorrect! Even the nuttier professors are beginning to believe that “time” may not exist after all –

It has taken them THIS long to get the message!

Discovery Magazine.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time/

“No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

Jud:

I am NOT at all agnostic on the subject. I am the ontological equivalent of an atheist – having been trying to get my eliminativist point of view over for twenty or thirty years as my writing bear out.

@Jud:

Your quote,

"Primitive abstractions like “space,” dating back to early hominids didn’t/doesn’t “travel” anywhere – particularly with another fantasy existential equestrian old trooper called “time” clinging to its metaphysical mane for grim death."

proves you are clueless. Physicists know the universe expanded from the Big Bang and still is. The expansion has been observed and recorded. You aren't even knowledgeable enough to have an intelligent discussion on this topic, then.

Thanks for proving my point.

I will say this, you are the best philosopher I've met so far, at twisting the meaning of words, and ignoring the facts, in a vain effort to try to disprove the obvious.

LMFAOL!

Spacetime is a symmetric group of point-instants.( A point-instant, I argue, is a probability function whose domain is the set of all physical events: this implies a propensity theory of probability.) The duration of an event is a function of probable increase in entropy, which in turn is a function of a complete system of events and probabilities."Time" may be defined by turning the fluctuation theorem, a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics related to the formula for compound interest, into a clause in its definiens. An event, an action, divided by its duration is the event's energy. A space, a timeslice of spacetime, is a set of point-instants that, according to at least some probability functions, are simultaneous and that cannot be added to without ceasing to be all simultaneous.

@Larry

Dr. Smid is just one of many who want to disprove Einstein. He uses any argument he can to try for an alternate explanation, but all the evidence for SR is self consistent with all the predictions for the other experiments.

His arguments against the twins paradox forget about the observational effect that reference frames have. Two reference frames may look like they're actually moving away at the same rate, but one could just be standing still. That's what he misses from the twins paradox.

Jud: @ Marshall:

If your abusive reply to my criticism of your curious transcendentalist approach to science is calculated to draw me in to a juvenile reciprocal exchange of ad hominem, rather than me continuing to soberly address the subject of the thread - then you have a lot to learn. The straw man (the slur that I am unaware of the Big Bang) by which you seek to wriggle out of explaining the flaws in your peculiar doctrines will not deter me from examining the danger to serious science of physicists factoring in abstraction to their investigations and enquiries.

As you can see from the following quote by Dr. Sten Odenwald of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “space” does not exist in any arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity and do not exist apart from the matter and energy.

You see it is not as simple as pelting bits of paper at a video camera to prove that “time” exists as you do in your experiment – it is far more serious than that and involves a re-examination of a host on imprinted reification that we are exposed to as young people which we internalise and come to believe actually exists.

In answer to the question concerning the so-called “existence” of space,

“Can space exist by itself without matter or energy around?”

Dr Sten Odenwald of NASA writes:

Quote:

“No.

Experiments continue to show that there is no 'space' that stands apart from space-time itself...no arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity. General relativity tells us that what we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe, so space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. This is not speculation, but sound observation.”

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Raytheon STX) for the NASA Astronomy Cafe, part of the NASA Education and Public Outreach program.

Here is the address of his website created in 1995 by Dr. Sten Odenwald, Harvard educated NASA Astronomer http://www.astronomycafe.net/

Therefore I repeat what I originally wrote on the subject of so-called, “space” which elicited your offensive behaviour, in which I was addressing my position – that we live in a wholly material cosmos and what man formerly conceptualised as “space” as areas completely lacking matter and energy (matergy) is in fact, an illusion. As Dr. Sten Odenwald of NASA explains above, space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field.

So once more for the record I repeat my original statement,

“There is no such thing as empty “space” waiting to accommodate photonic light and “time.” The term “space” is simply a useful fiction which helps to describe areas containing unsensed material from the sensed.”

The term "space-time " therefore should be semantically re-jigged to mean:

"Spatially situated - timed material."

and not the current erroneous meaning: an arena partially containing matter and partially containing "nothing" [sic]

My advice? Stop playing with bits of paper and giving college kids erroneous information about the non-existence of so-called “time” and other spooky paranormal playthings by throwing bits of paper and get down to a bit of abstraction-free research of which I am sure you are very capable.

Dear Larry,

Thank you for your wise words and pointing me towards Smid’s work on the subject. http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/print/ti

What Smid writes only confirms my general approach to physics – that it is beset with abstraction – not so much as philosophy – but enough to introduce ontological misunderstandings much more serious than those encountered amongst the chattering footnoting fictionalists to Plato.

Since first addressing this thread I have come across many references to “time” that share my claim that “time” is something defined by humans, not a physical thing, and that it is simply the comparison of the existential changes of objects that alter constitutionally, impinge upon other objects, are impinged upon by other objects, move or are moved, or remain stationary where the interstitial gaps between such events are measured using the the universally agreed metric yardstick (as manifested by proxy by clocks) of the moving earth, moon around the sun.

As far as I can see I appear to be the only one that transfers the “concept” of “time” to the changing existential modality (the event changes) of material objects themselves as in:

event 1 train leaves london – event 2 train reaches Birmighman

event 1 woman becomes pregnant – event 2 baby is born, etc

mapped to the monthly phases of the moon or fractions of the event-transit of the earth around the sun. As will become obvious this means that so-called “time-based” paradoxes like Zeno’s Tortoise and Achilles paradox will suddenly become scientifically as clear as crystal.

The resolution to Zeno's Paradox is easy once the abstraction "distance" is removed from its useful role developed to eliminate the periphrasis which (in order to explain the negative results of reification) I am now forced to employ.

Event (1) Tortoise and Achilles start race to traverse the room.

Event (2) Tortoise and Achilles reach the other side of room.

Analysis

(a) Tortoises move much slower than a healthy humans.

(b) Tortoise’s interstitual departure and arrival event-gap will be greater.

(c) Achilles’ interstitual departure and arrival event-gap will be smaller .

Fact: Distance" is an abstraction that does not exist.

(d) What exists are:

[1] the sides of the room,

[2] the tortoise

[3] Achilles

Conclusion.

(e) Achilles wins the race.

Explanation.

As the reification “distance does not exist, neither do the human conceptualisation of “distance” in to fractions or parts of such an abstraction. Thus there is a fourth and fifth physical component to this so-called paradox.

[4] the human originator of the ontological trick, i. e, the fractionalising of the abstraction “distance” Zeno.

[5] the reader who unwittingly swallows what is in a effect a simple physical event transcendentally twisted into into a mysterious “paradox" concerning the abstractions "time" and "distance."

Best wishes,

Jud

@Jud:

LOL! "Distance is an abstraction that doesn't exist". That's a good one. As far your juvenile analysis of my discussion of space and time, I'll let it stand as is. It's pretty obvious that I know that space and time are inextricably connected, but the discussion was about the nature of time, not space. But it's pointless pursuing it further with someone exhibiting such crank tendencies.

When you start coming up with experimental evidence to support your theories, let us know. But I won't be holding my breath for that one...

@Larry

No, it doesn't matter. I was just giving an example where each observer could look at the other and say that they're moving away at an arbitrary velocity when in fact, only one is. Smid has an example of two observers moving away at the same constant speed and says that no time dilation would occur and the clocks would read the same time. Well, I guess so - what people miss about SR is that there is more than one component. The deniers usually leave one of them out.

As for GPS and time dilation, here is the information - http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_Positioning_System#Special_and_general_relativity

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/05/nasas-gravity-probe-spacecraft-confirms-einsteins-warping-of-spacetime-frame-dragging.html

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/deep/5-recent-tests-that-prove-einstein-right

There are a lot of people that try to out think Einstein. They're usually not very good at it...

@Larry:

I know about the alternative physics site and if you'd read more from you'd see that all the guy tries to do is come up with an alternative explanation for time dilation which I found unconvincing. He was able to show that it doesn't happen from muon experiments or other tests, only the Michelson Morley experiments and the one with the clocks on the planes.

Your opening statement about observers, as if that would be one of the components I was referring, is ridiculous on its face.

I don't worship Einstein. I'm into quantum mechanics and all its strangeness and he wasn't. In the end he problems with the notion of time, he failed to devise a complete unified field theory and he goofed with his cosmological constant. But experimental evidence is worth more than words any day of the week and despite the H&K failure and the misinformation that the alternativephysics site has on GPS, the experimental evidence supports time dilation. My STDTS technology was based on research derived from Einstein's work. My camera experiment supports the model of time being a dimension connected to space.

When time deniers and the anti-Einstein crowd start devising experiments to prove alternate theories, then maybe someone will pay attention. But so far, they haven't...

Marshall writes:

LOL! "Distance is an abstraction that doesn't exist". That's a good one.

Jud: “The abstraction “distance” in relation to the attraction “time” is merely an anthropocentric reification originating in the concept of the relative size of the material-filled gap between two places in relation to the body size of a human being (a typical human stride or the average size of a human hand, etc. Other species of perceiving entities would have their own species-centric notion of a gap-size related to their own proportions, or other measurable characteristics. Together with a material-based abstracted interstitial event-calculus (“time”) concerned with the differentiation and integration of abstractively imagined functions.

Later, humans became more sophisticated: Compare the original International Prototype Metre Standard Bar that was the standard measure which, when mentally abstracted, served as the benchmark of “ distance” from 1889 to 1960 which was constructed in 1799 and is housed in the Archives de la République in Paris. It's composed of an alloy of ninety percent platinum and ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice. The bar which acted as the material basis, from which the abstraction “distance” is transcendentally extrapolated, which together with an earth-moon-sun-based clock, enabled us to employ the abstraction “time” in calculations regarding the abstraction “movement” when a moving object relocates from A to B.

The participatory ontological elements involved in material-gaps consist of:

(a)

(1) The human ideator which exists ideationally at a given spatial position

(2) Object of separation (X) - The Statue of Liberty.

(b)

The material constituents occupying the intervening gap

Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, plus windblown detritus, and other local pollutants, plus water vapour, etc.( Together with that which is present off Earth too ) including bombarding particle types, protons, electrons, isotopes of hydrogen through zinc, photons that spray the Earth from any location outside the atmosphere, solar energetic particles, which are lower energy cosmic rays of solar origin, ACRs (anomalous cosmic rays), particles which originate within local interstellar space, and GCRs which originate far outside the solar system but mainly within the Milky Way galaxy.

(c) Object of separation (Y) - The Empire State Building

(d) The intervening gap between the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building is 7.4 Miles originally based upon an abstractive extrapolation of the ancient Roman mile, based on 1,000 double human leg paces (one step with each foot), for about 4,860 feet,

Marshall: As for your juvenile analysis of my discussion of space and time, I'll let it stand as is.

Jud: You might do so – I will not – I shall continue to critique your weird occult doctrines with your claims that there exist paranormal, ontologically unprovable, entiatic/entitic domains which lack existence, being, or actuality. The usefully fictive reificatives to which you attribute concrecity lack material nominata. They bespeak of the manner in which the attributive human categorisors themselves exist, rather than the manner in which the the entitative attributees exist. You exist in a modality of existentialising the linguistic description of the activity of objects into objectve concretia in their own right.* in the belief that in some occult fashion your ego/homocentric *values* are magically instantiated, transposed, infused and intrinsically absorbed by the categorised timed-object by a twisted insouciant twirl of your transcendentalist twizzle-stick

Objects exist in the way, manner and mode in which they exist - it may be tautologous - but it is a fact you need to know. A human, a dog, a mountain, a hat-pin and A CLOCK all exist in the particular ever-changing molecular configuration in which they are present in the cosmos in a particular nano-second of what humans imagine to be an interstice of “time“ utterly irrespective of what human linguistic signs are arbitrarily attributed to them in order that homosapiens may mentally signify and representationally store such significata to target denotata which match the collocations of chemico-electric data in their neural nets.

Marshall: It's pretty obvious that I know that space and time are inextricably connected,

Jud: They are not. There is NO physical connection between two non-existent abstractions. What exist are the neurons in your brain which due to phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage called “imprinting”) have connected (due to childhood imprintation – compare Lorenz’s greylag geese) to imbue these faulty ideas that abstraction actually exist.

Marshall: but the discussion was about the nature of time, not space.

Jud: It still is. It was you in your opening sentence in this discussion which first introduced “space” When you wrote: “Einstein said that both time and space are malleable.”

And you have continued to address the abstraction in most of your posts in this thread.

Marshall: But it's pointless pursuing it further with someone exhibiting such crank tendencies. When you start coming up with experimental evidence to support your theories, let us know. But I won't be holding my breath for that one…

Jud: It is not my responsibility to prove that the De Coelesti Hierarchia that occupy your fantasy-world exist (with or without wings) You must answer to your peers for acting as the self-appointed supernatural messenger of the metaphysical mess you are in. As the old saying goes “You must learn to understand that whilst you are the master of the unspoken word - the spoken word is the master of you.”

As Oliver Hardy once said to Stan Laurel (after he has said: “that’s another fine mess you’ve got me into,” –

"It’s your responsibility to prove the existence of your hallucinationary pecking order of un-verifiable vacuity with hard evidence. But please… no more silly games - like getting school-kids to wave bits of paper in front of a video camera!

99.99% of our brain is not about building abstraction but about acting in the world. I remember when I was an engineering student learning all kind of weird abstractions about the world. These abstractions did not look real at first. Then we were using these abstractions to predict experiments in the lab. Gradually, the more we use these abstractions to predict, the more psychologically we cease to see them as approximation to reality but as reality. Then we go on and learn other abstractions based on the first one, at first they look as abstraction and when we used them successfully, we remove our critical distance from it and again accept it as reality. This is a natural tendency of a pragmatic being indwelling uncritically in the world. There is a confusion between tools of the mind and reality. Newton theory of gravitaition is still a very good tool for many applications. Nowadays we do not use it to describe the reality of the world. General Relativity is a better tool for predicting events at speed close to the speed of light but we cannot use it as a realistic description of the world. The reason is that we know that this description is not compatible with quantum theory. Both theories are efficient predicting tools in different domains but they are theoretically incompatible. Physical theories are like useful maps of a subway. The fact that you can use effectively these maps in order to navigate the city does not mean that they represent the city. It would stupid to take a subway map for reality.

Jud:

Take your meds before we call the doctors...

Jud:

Hi Louis:

I agree completely with your account of the way we internalise and employ abstraction in order to successfully predict the behaviour of material objects

Louis:

There is a confusion between tools of the mind and reality.

Jud: Absolutely, and this is the trap that poor Marshall has fallen into – unlike you and me and others, he has obviously been over-printed and over-impressed during HIS neuro-linguistic programming (the conditioning phase of his early youth) with more than ordinary zeal and thus is incapable in his maturity to recognise folly of existentialising (cognitively concretising) the tools of his mind as real quasi- objects. As the famous Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said:

“The description is not the described, it is like a man who is hungry. Any amount of description of the right kind of food will never satisfy him. He is hungry, he wants food.

"http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php? tid=1101&chid=805

Louis: The fact that you can use effectively these maps in order to navigate the city does not mean that they represent the city. It would stupid to take a subway map for reality.

Jud: Precisely. This is exactly what Alfred Korzybski meant when he spoke of the relationship between an object and a mental representation (description of that object,) as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Hence his famous remark "the map is not the territory," He also wrote that 'A civilisation that cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.’

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/matherne_korzybski.htm

Mariusz Grygianiec, provides a good account of Tadeusz Kotarbinski (1886-1981) who is excellent on the rejection of abstraction (other than useful fiction) He owes his fame to what he called: is reism or concretism. It is based on the so-called system of calculation of names

(or ontology) formulated by the great Polish logician Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939).”

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/kotarbinski.htm

Jud

Jud:

I guess you didn't hear the announcement about not eating the brown acid. It's bad, man...

Larry:

OK, so I won't treat you like an adult with the typical common sense and cognitive abilities that I would expect from one. That being said, I would expect you to be able to comprehend what I write about my activities, which leans towards experimental proofs of things. Such being the case, please tell to the rest of the class how you can explain how your quoting, "Thus, one might note that 'Observers are not required to confirm physical events. Either the dilation occurs or it doesn’t. And if does then you need to specify which clock experiences more of it.' would be relevant to my statement about the components of SR. It's not a matter of understanding physics but of knowing a pejorative statement when you see it. And please note that 50% of your grade rests on your ability to present a cogent response...

Bonus Points Section:

For extra points, figure out the discrepancy between the typical GPS operational data and how it's presented on the alternativephysics.org site that would indicate why the author there is wrong. When a free prize if you get it right...No Joke!

Marshall, how can i read more about your ^^camera experiment supports the model of time being a dimension connected to space^^.

Thank you.

"It is only as entering into the living and moving organization of a much wider tract of time that the strict present is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably never even conceived of by thos unaccustomed to philosophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion that it must exit, but that it does exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience…

The only fact of our immediate experience is … the specious present … the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearward – a forward-looking end.” William James 1890

For Bergson, the specious present, or temporal awareness, instead of being directed upon a moment of time, is directed upon stretches of time unfolding with various rhythms with the priority of the temporal whole over the temporal part. Intuition gradually reveals this complexity over time and reveal that experience is not unstructured as a series of momentary experiences. We can expand our scope of temporal attention, or we can narrow it. If we narrow it, we fragment it and go in the direction of simple items of experience possessing quantitative properties.

“Going in the other direction, we go towards a duration which is more and more tense, contracted and intensified: the limit hre would be eternity. … Between these two extremes intuition moves, and this movement is metaphysics itself.” Bergson

“In order to create or to understand the structure of a film or a symphony, one has to grasp it as a whole, exactly as one would the composition of a painting. It must be apprehended as a sequence but this sequence cannot be temporal in the sense that one phase disappears as the next occupies our consciousness. The whole work must be simultaneously present in the mind if we are to understand its development, its coherence, the interrelations among its parts. We are tempted to call the object of this synopsis a spatial structure. In any case, it requires simultaneity and therefore is hardly temporal.

In a letter of 1789, attributed to Mozart …, the phenomenon of musical simultaneity is admirably described. When a theme has caugh the composer’s attention, “it becomes larger and larger, and I spread it out more and more widely and clearly, and the thing really gets to be almost completed in my head, even if it is long, so that thereafter I survey it in my mind at one glance, like a beautiful picture or handsome person. And I hear it in my imagination not in sequence, as it will have to unfold afterward, but, at it were, right away all togethere (wie gleich alles zusammen).” “

Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception

@Larry:

No one here is holding a class. We're a bunch of adults, with varying backgrounds, having discussions that sometimes get heated. I, for one, get tired of having to repeat the obvious, so sometimes I expect someone to get off their backside and look something up, if prompted. You're asking me about why I'm dismissive of the atomic clock experiment and I'm thinking "Why am I even talking with this guy?" I had already stated and given links to other experiments, that supported time dilation, which obviously means that the support for it doesn't hinge on the atomic clock tests. Hello? So when I take the time to state something and then I get hit with something as if I had never taken the time in the first place, then I get rubbed the wrong way because what difference is it going to make if I respond again when my first response was ignored? Maybe you have that kind of time - I don't. It's bad enough dueling with cranks like Jud, but at least then I get psychological analysis and other data that I can use as to the incapability of many people to even begin to understand time and their penchant to recursively refer to what ancient people used to think before there was any scientific basis for researching time, as a crutch. That I can use in my research and lectures, so that has value. Jud's mind numbing rant is particularly useful, once deconstructed and analyzed.

Repeating myself when the information is already posted, has no value. Sorry, but if I'm supposed to act like a teacher, I want paid for it. I donate my time in real classrooms already. If I misread your intentions, I'm sorry, but I expect people to think a little about the topic before posting things in the middle of a debate. If I see them repeating the same stuff, then my impression is that they're not paying attention or just trying to jerk me around. Neither, makes me a fan...

Jud: You might like the work of Michael Polanyi.

Sunil:

I agree with your first few statements. I disagree that no one knows what time is. I agree that it is a dimension of the field, that is if you mean "space" when you say field, but and if that is the case, then certainly I know what that means and I wouldn't suggest that I'm alone in that.

If the universe is eternal, and I wouldn't believe that, that has nothing to do with time being cyclical. That's would be like saying that because winter follows fall repeatedly that time is cyclical. It's not time being cyclical, but the seasons which are events that take place within time.

Big difference...

@Eder & Larry:

The explanation of the experiment is on the page with the video.

http://physicsintrouble.iwarp.com/NLD_GHHS_time_test.html

@Giuseppe:

A multiverse is where you have more than one universe, simultaneously. Not consecutively.

Time and space are synonyms. It is both linear and cyclic.

Marshall/Giuseppe, thinking in multiverse, a Hubble photo could be an explosion in slowmotion for us, in other space-time scale, like your experiment...

Larry, i thought this way: if we consider telescope Hubble like one point orbiting an atom in our world what will it see? I made some photos with my cellular, that i called "Nebulas at Home".

Other one

Other one

One Hubble's photo

Larry, i have been thinking this since i was about 10 years old. I thought we are a giant, inside other one, etc. Something like the link above.

Mr. Khan the links at your abstract do not work.

A tardive contribution to this discussion. Actually, physics has very natural unified description in terms of cyclic time. A description of physics phenomena as elementary cycles is already implicit in the wave-particle duality. Since every particle is a cyclic phenomenon and the universe is made of particles, it follows that the universe can be described in terms of elementary cycles.

Article Elementary cycles of time

Another paper

Article Elementary spacetime cycles

And another

Article Clockwork Quantum Universe

You ask: What is time? Is it linear or cyclic? Yes, some regard time as an arrow or linear while some religions regard it cyclic. We have a conceptual mention as linear because we are that we live and work and as a people have calculated this in matematic and in phisic with our mention for our interest and we immediately say we were in that time we are in this time and we will be in that time in this this age and in this plase, but the time is ciclic because the time exist out of out mention as a natural phenomenon. So, we can be for "book of memories", and our globe exsists, when other people is working and living and natural phenomenon in its cicle continuing. Thats all!

So everything is repeated as a natural cycle feonmen except we put the notion of linear time in order to know where we are ... studing, working, loving and so and so ...

When we look at the different spatial/temporal scales of the universe, there are new structures for about a scale factor of 100 from the quark to the super ama clusters with the human scale at the center. There is also a symmetry of creation between the largest layers toward the mid scale layer and the smallest layers towards the mid-scale layer. The most surprising is that the largest layer, the structure of the CMB correspond to structure in the quantum foam. So spatial dimension is cyclic and the temporal dimension is cyclic.

Dear Professor Mohammad Firoz Khan,

Time is cyclic. It moves on linear scale from one state to another and from the last state it recycles back.

For illustration, let us assume a discrete space and model it with a simple graph. Further, let us say it has three nodes, a, b, and c.

Let a full listing of edges be a state. For example: if only a and b are connected, the state would be ; if a and b and also a and c were connected, then ; etc.

Now, let a "force" exist that changes the state. Say we start with and (suddenly) find ourselves with . Call any such change a "tick" of time. Now, intrinsically (from the inside view) this occurred instantaneously; extrinsically (from the outside) we might observe a lapse of time from state to state.

Now, we might model this as a finite state machine, I believe. So we can expect a cyclic nature. If we have hived-off regions, then internal observers would get a sense of time relative to one or more of the other regions. An outside observer might see long pauses interspersing rapid changes -- the changes of state might be quite random. But from the inside, it is all relative.

Now, if our space is also expanding (new nodes being somehow incorporated or created within its boundary) we might not only see periodic behavior (probably within a relatively hived-off region) but also apparent linearity (because adding new nodes probably breaks up cyclic paths within the space as a whole.

So, under this model, time is simply a change in state, measurement of time is relative, and the "arrow of time" is simply a manifestation of an expanding boundary.

I hope I've explained this somewhat clearly.

@Thomas:

Yep, I got it and you made a common error. Time isn't change. Time is the dimension that allows change to take place. It has nothing to do with how you measure the change...

It is not possible to go back in time. But while we use for measurements time is is considered as cyclical in general but in some circumstances we consider time as linear as it only goes in one direction.

It's intriguing to think of time as a fourth dimension: then objects could be visualized as "worms" in spacetime. If we model a person as a dynamic vortex of atoms, then in 4D we would visualize that person as somewhat like wriggling gobs of angel-hair spaghetti: strands weaving in and raveling out with each ingestion and egestion; multiple threads coming together as an object at conception; gathering and concentrating into maturity; dissipating with old age and death.

Such an approach might be an interesting way to explore the Ship of Theseus "paradox".

How can we justify -- given its oddly quirky behavior -- including time as a dimension in the same vein as the three "well behaved" dimensions of space? Because we have developed a measure for it?

@Thomas Sandidge:

As I said before, measure has nothing to do with defining time. The reason is that time is not a construct of Man, it existed before us. As a result, because of the egocentric nature of philosophy, most researchers of time have looked at it from their own perspective, as if that meant anything. Time is connected to any and every dimension of space. Space is where things are, but without time, there is no place for events to take place. It is like comparing a picture to a movie. The picture shows something happening in space but at a single moment. Nothing else can be shown because it is just that moment. A movie shows everything because it has the temporal capacity to do so.

Measurement is irrelevant because all measurements are arbitrary. Time measurements on Earth are different than they are on Mars. But those have nothing to do with the attributes and geometry of time itself at all...

Marshall,

1. Time isn't change.

There would be no time if there would be no change. Time is a parameterization of change of measureable. Some aspect of change can be predicted and so parameterize but not all.

2. Time is the dimension that allows change to take place.

Time being a parameter, yes it is a dimension in the mathematical expression but not in the reality.

3. It has nothing to do with how you measure the change...

I agree but it all all to do how we express it.

@Louis:

"There would be no time if there would be no change"

You've got it backwards, pal. Time is the dimension that allows for change. It why time and space expanded faster than the speed of light after the Big Bang. Space had to be expanding to accommodate everything and time went with it because time is connected to any dimension of space. You're strictly thinking inside the box, ignoring forest for the tree.

"Time being a parameter, yes it is a dimension in the mathematical expression but not in the reality."

I'm not talking mathematics, I'm talking reality. That's why my model accounts for everything and guys like you are still sitting around discussing whether time is cyclic or not. If time wasn't real, in and of itself, guess what? Time dilation wouldn't exist and velocities of foreground and background objects in photography wouldn't require specific shutter speeds. Everyone that wants to deny time is real is left with all these questions and mysteries, where my model has none. It is self consistent, repeatable and demonstrable.

3. It has nothing to do with how you measure the change...

"I agree but it all all to do how we express it."

I've said it once and I'll say it a million times. If you want to understand time, forget about how people deal with it, because people didn't invent it. The first thing that let's you know that scientist is clueless about time is when they begin their book or talk discussing ways in which man kept calendars and used clocks. That's when you know that have no intention of explaining anything about time itself.

Dear Mohammad

The differences are significant

Linear time has meaning. The phases unchanged moments is driven by a final purpose. That is, all events have meaning as they occur in view of ultimate purpose.

The time to the ancient Greeks is but an inexorable circle - no way out and no end. Everything is going to turn the wheel of history forever.

In my opinion the time period is lived or experienced by each comparison be it concret or abstract

From the point of the view of the attached presentation:

R. Movassagh, Status of Time in Physics, Dept. of Mathematics, MIT/Northwestern, September 17, 2012

The prosaic view is that time is the continuing sequence of events in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Time is also a measure of the durations and frequencies of events and intervals between them.

Movassagh goes on to consider quite a number of views of time that include

Omar Khayyam: non-determinism.

Issac Newton: absolute time...time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration.

Maxwell ==> special theory of relativity: relativity of space and time (nothing absolute about either space or time), a perfect Kantian universe.

Kurt Godel: closed timelike curves

James,

A sequence of events always exists for a given observer. We cannot omit the observer. It is always a sequence of events as observed by a given observer. The sequence of supernova explosion as seen from any observers in this galaxie is the same but the the same from another galaxie at the other end of the observable universe. Sequence: a, b, c, d, e may become c b a d, e. Given that all observers are in the same universe which started expanding 14.7 billion years ago, is there a universal standard sequencing of the supernova. Every observers would get the same supernova sequence in the standard observer viewpoint?

Louis,

Yes, the passage of time requires an observer. The question arises: Does time exist if there is no observer to keep track of a sequence of events?

James,

First we need to agree onto an operational way through which an observer can specify time. Maybe through the observersation of a sequence of specific events. If these events can be detected throughout the visible universe then maybe we could manage to agree onto an universal sequence of these events and thus defining an universal time.

Time for me is a concept that can be used into theoretical constructs. It can be usefull to predict what is going on in reality but reality is in principle unknowable so existence of time does not make any sense to me. Concepts never exist out there. They only exist in our mind and are usefull or not.

Louis,

How would you answer the question: Quelle heure est'il?

But then what would you do if nobody in the universe had a time piece (recorder of time) to check?

For Newton, time was synonymous with duration.

But for Einstein, time is relative to the observer.