Time is Nonexistent

[Hermit]

I remember when I was a kid figuring that time was motion

Perhaps there is more to that way of looking at time than you give it credit for.

My conception of time is almost as pedestrian and prosaic. To me it is no more than an abstraction of the interval between events, such as sunrise and sunset or sowing and harvesting. Incidentally this way of looking at time means that we can no more go back in time than things can unhappen.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Time exists, whether we measure it or not. The more interesting question is: why does it only go in one direction?

lofuji

No, the really interesting question is 'what is "now" and why do we experience it?'

Or to put it another way - out of all the 'points' on my personal timeline I could be experiencing, why am I experiencing this point?

[Trolldor]

Time exists, whether we measure it or not. The more interesting question is: why does it only go in one direction?

lofuji

No, the really interesting question is 'what is "now" and why do we experience it?'

Or to put it another way - out of all the 'points' on my personal timeline I could be experiencing, why am I experiencing this point?

"Why" doesn't factor in to it. It just happened this way.

[normal]

Time exists, whether we measure it or not. The more interesting question is: why does it only go in one direction?

lofuji

No, the really interesting question is 'what is "now" and why do we experience it?'

Or to put it another way - out of all the 'points' on my personal timeline I could be experiencing, why am I experiencing this point?

"Why" doesn't factor in to it. It just happened this way.

This is a central point to all existence. I once carved the word WHY into my arm as a neat tattoo depicting my feeling of hopelessnes and personal tragedy. This, I realized later, was just teenage melodrama, not actual hopelessnes and tragedy. The real question isn't "why?", it's "why not?". This goes for nearly all why questions.

Why are bananas yellow? Well.. Why not?

Why are we here? Well.. Why not?

Why does time go in only one direction? Well, why the hell should it move in any other direction? So the question is why not?

I shall have to carve a "not" into my arm to complete the question.

[Trolldor]

"How" is a better way to phrase the question, I suppose, and I'm guess it might have been what Horwood meant.
"How did it turn out this way?"

[normal]

"How" is a better way to phrase the question, I suppose, and I'm guess it might have been what Horwood meant.
"How did it turn out this way?"

Yes, that is the ultimate. Why not is mostly a way to remind us that "why" is often not a good question

[eXcommunicate]

I just look at time as the process of change. Without change, there would be no time, and vice versa. With the heat death of the Universe (0 Kelvin) would come the end of time.

[eXcommunicate]

"How" is a better way to phrase the question, I suppose, and I'm guess it might have been what Horwood meant.
"How did it turn out this way?"

Alright Feynman.

[Little Idiot]

This is the first time I haven't received a "FAIL" for the first post.

Does this mean the world is ending?

No, it means you are well on the way to being as lost and confused as the rest of us.
Enjoy

[eXcommunicate]

This is the first time I haven't received a "FAIL" for the first post.

Does this mean the world is ending?

No, it means you are well on the way to being as lost and confused as the rest of us.
Enjoy

Misery loves company!

[week15]

I'd like to consider two pieces:

In our memories, yes, they are, but our memories cannot be viewed by other beings. A daydream isn't real, is it? It is not.

I would actually say that a daydream is very real, in a sense. The neural pathways exercised in a daydream or in the act of remembering have physical, concrete reality. Saying that a daydream does not exist is much like saying a computer program does not exist (both are nonphysical entities that exist inside a "hardware" thatcan be subjected to tests and outside scrutiny.

To think of this topic further, time cannot exist more than once. The current moment for this time's existence is 0.00000000...(infinite amount of 0s)...1. Once that time passes, it no longer exists.

This seems like the old riddle, "What's always coming but never gets here? Answer: Tomorrow because when it gets here it is today." More precisely, it seems a reiteration of Zeno's paradox of motion (Achilles and the tortoise), set now to temporal world instead of the physical one. We need not pass through every numerical position in time in order to travel through any arbitrary measure of a moment. Take "now" as the set of all divisions of time between event A and event B. You need not go into an infinite regress of moments because, no matter how deeply we can theorize them, the precision with which we define a moment is arbitrary. I was reading the other day (I believe in Discover magazine of all places) that human consciousness lives in "moments" of approximately five to nine seconds.

[week15]

........The more interesting question is: why does it only go in one direction?

lofuji

Do we really know it only goes in one direction? I mean, since everything is subject to it (including our perception of it) then how would we know whether it was going backwards or forwards?

Does anyone know of any experiments etc. which prove or hint that it always goes forward?

You have to begin by viewing space time as inexorably linked to see it, but much of Steven Hawkins recent work is related to the question. The old scientific paradigm is that if you ran the universe in reverse, everything would move backwards in such a way as to lead back, step by step, to the big bang. As long as all the information is there, it can be done (well, not "can" in the sense of anyone actually being able to, but theoretically if you were able to reverse every force and law governing the universe). The problem occurs, however, that in formation is lost into black holes which (paradoxically) leak information through very low levels of radiated heat caused by the spontaneous generation of particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon (one particle being swallowed and the other particle being released into the knowable universe... and Hawkins would have to explain that to you in better detail-- I'm just an English teacher). Basically, because one of the particles escapes, the total energy of the black hole is reduced. On impossibly long time scales, that results in the eventual dissipation of the black hole, denying our friends at the friendly "time-reversal" company from having every bit of information (energy) available to switch things up.
Not to say, necessarily, that many cosmologists are buying this; but you asked for a resource.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

For the benefit of our newer members. You might find the book, The End Of Time by Julian Barbour interesting in the light of this thread. it is heavy going if you are unused to degree level physics but well worth struggling through. He has some very interesting and brain-boggling views on time - for one, that it doesn't actually exist at all!

[newolder]

Besides research papers, I have written two books: The Discovery of Dynamics, which investigates the background to Newton’s great discoveries, and The End of Time, which is written for both the general reader and scientists. In it I argue that time is ultimately an illusion.

I have not read Julian's published work, yet, but can a single sentence show how it is illusory that this published work is in the past?

I'm watching Julian's yewtewb as I write and I have no promble with the fact that there is no linear time: I learned this at university and recent observations find ridiculous correspondence with the predictions of general relativity theory – the best theory of time we have.

Presumably, Julian keeps up with developments (another notion difficult to reconcile with the idea of no time) and is aware of Roger Penrose's take on these matters? He (RP) states that it is impossible to make a pendulum clock (or any other 'time-piece' for that matter) in the absence of mass and this is shown clearly by a simple blend of relativity theory and quantum mechanics: E = hυ = mc2 such that, to unit definition, mass and frequency (reciprocal time) are equivalent. Without mass, there is no time and this is not an illusion.
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-prof ... nrose-/441
Whether or not this 'crazy idea' will map the variance of the CMBR correctly is a job for future investigators to discover.

[Animavore]

That reminds me.

I've to be at a meeting at 2:30.