Time

Originally posted by sonhouse
You do know, I hope, that time flow is a variable, first depending on how deep you are into a gravity well and second how much velocity you have relative to other objects so if you manage to go say at 99% of c, and you journey 7 light years away, only one year passes in your spacecraft but 7 years goes by on Earth. That is a fact.

I'm sure he knows time flow is variable. His point however seems to be our concept of 'time' (how we understand it) comes from the observation and understanding* of 'change'... or we could call it motion, same difference.
Basically flow of 'time' means positions are never static, and this is true whether we're looking at objects such as asteroids or considering the motion of (what appears to be) a motionless rock at the atomic level.

* grok
( Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land )

Originally posted by sonhouse
You do know, I hope, that time flow is a variable, first depending on how deep you are into a gravity well and second how much velocity you have relative to other objects so if you manage to go say at 99% of c, and you journey 7 light years away, only one year passes in your spacecraft but 7 years goes by on Earth. That is a fact.

I don't know if your numbers are right, but your concept is. You understand the traveler got only one regular lifetime?

Originally posted by apathist
I already asked that question. So you believe in god-time.

what is "god-time"? I have no idea what you are talking about.

Originally posted by apathist
No, humy. I don't hate religion and am not afraid of it.

I never implied you did.
what has hating it or being afraid of it got to do with anything?

Religion was crucial to the rise of our kind.

what "kind" which that be? human kind? if so, no, it wasn't. We would still evolved with or without such irrational beliefs.

It will inhabit our starships.

possibly; if so, that will be a bad thing.

Because pure science is ignorant.

This by vary far has to be the statement that appalls me the most out of all you said so far:
How can pure science be "ignorant"?
In what sense "ignorant"?
"ignorant" of what exactly?
That makes no sense.

You do know what "pure science" is, right?
Google it.
It is simply science for the understanding things for understanding for its own sake without regard to the practical applications of science.

Originally posted by apathist
Change 'time' to 'change', and bring it back to me.

don't see how that helps.
If I changed the word "time" with "change" in those last two quotes of mine then my previous quotes become;

"Change doesn't cease to exist if we didn't measure it.
Before the first person measured change, did change exist? "

Do you believe change only exists when we measure it? -Not sure what you are saying here.

Originally posted by humy

Because pure science is ignorant.

This by vary far has to be the statement that appalls me the most out of all you said so far:
How can pure science be "ignorant"?
In what sense "ignorant"?
"ignorant" of what exactly?
That makes no sense.

You do know what "pure science" is, right?

We are not logic machines, humy. We have other needs, to which pure science is blind.

Originally posted by humy
Do you believe change only exists when we measure it? -Not sure what you are saying here.

Time is measurement of change. Think I've been clear about that.

Originally posted by apathist
We are not logic machines, humy. We have other needs, to which pure science is blind.

We are not logic machines, humy.

Any given human is very rarely if ever always purely logical, right. But most of us are capable of being reasonably logical and rational for most of the time. Have you got something against being logical or rational?

We have other needs, to which pure science is blind.

Of course we have needs that have nothing to to with pure science; so what? How is that criticism against pure science?
We also have needs that have nothing to do with religion thus, by the same 'logic', is that a mark against religion?
Not that I imply there the nonsense we 'need' religion for something other than for false belief for the sake of making some emotionally weak people deal with hard reality by escaping from hard reality with happy wild delusional belief rather than learn to be strong and withstand hard reality without such wild delusions. I recommend learning emotional strength over delusional belief.
And how does that make, as you claimed, pure science "ignorant", whatever that is supposed to mean?
Would that be an "ignorant" consisting of failure to provide delusional beliefs for emotionally weak people so discourage them from what they really should be doing which is to learn to be emotionally strong to accept hard realities?
If so, good! That is a mark in favor of pure science!

Originally posted by apathist
Time is measurement of change. Think I've been clear about that.

No this is wrong. Within the theory of General Relativity, which is the current paradigm theory, time is a dimension just as the three spatial dimensions are. We measure progress through that dimension by measuring changes, but that does not mean that time is change, it is what change happens in. It could turn out that GR will be replaced by another theory in the future in which time has a status closer to what you are saying, but as things stand our best theory of time is that it is a dimension.

Originally posted by humy
Any given human is very rarely if ever always purely logical, right.

Not just that. Science is unable to address many of our questions. Logic and reason are tools and nothing more. Every tool has a job, and can be misused. Beware of scientism, humy.

Originally posted by DeepThought
No this is wrong. Within the theory of General Relativity, which is the current paradigm theory, time is a dimension just as the three spatial dimensions are. We measure progress through that dimension by measuring changes, but that does not mean that time is change, it is what change happens in. It could turn out that GR will be replaced by another theo ...[text shortened]... loser to what you are saying, but as things stand our best theory of time is that it is a dimension.

Yesterday is gone now. We have no freedom of movement in time, unlike the freedom of movement that comes with the spatial dimensions.

Imagine change stops occurring. Where is time then?

Originally posted by DeepThought
No this is wrong. Within the theory of General Relativity, which is the current paradigm theory, time is a dimension just as the three spatial dimensions are. We measure progress through that dimension by measuring changes, but that does not mean that time is change, it is what change happens in. It could turn out that GR will be replaced by another t ...[text shortened]... r to what you are saying, but as things stand our best theory of time is that it is a dimension.

"It could turn out that GR will be replaced by another theory in the future in which time has a status closer to what you are saying, but as things stand our best theory of time is that it is a dimension."

So what your saying is the rigours of practicing physics hasn't completely clipped your wings of free form imagination? What is your "best philisophical guess" as to the universe as we see it?

Originally posted by apathist
Yesterday is gone now. We have no freedom of movement in time, unlike the freedom of movement that comes with the spatial dimensions.

Imagine change stops occurring. Where is time then?

Change could stop entirely, and I think Time would keep clicking right along. I believe Time is a manifestation of the frequency at which I ( that is my sensory organs) check for/or sense change in the universe. I think my temporal frequency is independent of change, and hence time is independent of change.

If you have ever smoked marijuana you will have undoubtedly had the experience of a reduced temporal frequency. 15 min can feel like hours. The rate at which you "ping" the universe can slow down ( if you let it) and one can get lost in time. Incidentally this initial change in frequency of pinging the universe is probably where the inrush of anxiety comes from for infrequent users.

I would imagine that cocaine has the opposite effect on your temporal frequency.

Originally posted by apathist
Yesterday is gone now. We have no freedom of movement in time, unlike the freedom of movement that comes with the spatial dimensions.

Imagine change stops occurring. Where is time then?

Your perception of time is due to chemical rates and signal path duration as neurones fire signals at one another. That there is an arrow of time is to do with entropy rather than anything particularly fundamental to the dimension itself. Entropy always increases and has a maximum, when all micro-canonical states are equally probable, in that situation thermodynamic processes cannot happen and there is no change. This doesn't mean time has gone away, the dimension still exists. It just means that nothing interesting happens, which is a different thing from time somehow ceasing to exist, which would involve the universe ceasing to exist.

Originally posted by joe shmo
"It could turn out that GR will be replaced by another theory in the future in which time has a status closer to what you are saying, but as things stand our best theory of time is that it is a dimension."

So what your saying is the rigours of practicing physics hasn't completely clipped your wings of free form imagination? What is your "best philisophical guess" as to the universe as we see it?

The short answer is supervenience physicalism. Although that should be regarded as an approximation to my position - there's a lot of "don't know" - it's more that it gives me something to say. What physics does is rule out some behaviours, so if you throw a ball then to a first approximation it goes in a parabola. But any parabola is possible (subject to initial conditions). So biology has its own rules, there is nothing in physics or chemistry to say that living things have to have left handed chiral molecules, but all life that we know of is based around molecules of that chirality.

Physics is the study of nature, but the scope of physics tends to be those areas where reductionism works well. Physics methods do not work so well in biology and are hopeless in areas like economics and sociology. There are too many additional rules that are non-fundamental.