Time: Real or Illusory?

[ChihuahuaRevolt]

IMO......

Time is something that is human made, or labeled rather. It was measured by the amount of time it takes for the sun to pass over us (a simple tool for measurement when man first came about) and is used (by us) to explain aging. Or "past present future" times.

So, to me, question is, is it something that already existed that we put a name to, or did we just put a name to something that doesnt really exist?

I also saw a documentary the other day about quantum physics and atoms, and how technically, a single particle will be in more than one place at one time, and so will large visible objects, but once we turn to look at it, it all kind of "condenses" into one spot. The documentary also said that by this line of thinking, we can technically jump into the past just the same that we are constantly traveling into the future.

I think "time" is something way way way more complex than the numbers on the clock, and we are not nearly intelligent enough to be able to begin to understand everything that the word "time" encompasses.

Ah, I dunno. Time will tell

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]

Well, if you can invent a metric to measure something that occurs before the metric is invented, then I'd say it necessarily existed before we put a name to it.

Where we got confused is when we made the observation that aging - as in a body slowly breaking down - coincidentally happens with time. Time is more like the measure of the rate at which things happen, so yes if you slow down time, by travelling at large fractions of the speed of light for example, then you age more slowly, but you notice no apparent difference because in doing so you've slowed down the workings of everything. If your life span was 100 local years before you accelerated, then it will still be 100 local years. To those who have not accelerated it might be 200 years, but to you it is still 100.

 

[sprinkles]

Also simultaneity and order of events matters because for example if you have an experiment where a machine creates a particle in a prior time which is detected by a bomb and blows up the experiment before the particle was created, then you have no particle and the bomb can't blow up.

 

[Qlip]

That could be. I don't know. Is illusory the opposite of real (or relevant)?

We speak of time only in the context of motion: sequence, order of events of real objects. The hands moving around a clock (represented digitally these days but the representation comes from our viewing of the physical motion of objects).

So if you take away the objects, what do you have left? A vacuum? Then what happened to time? I'm eliminating gravitational effects originating from outside this framework.

All I know of science is what I read out of the corner of my eye in Poupular Science magazine on a lunch break, but isn't there really no such thing as a vaccum really. I remember something about quantum fluctuations.

Anyway, I can see what you are saying in your thought expiriment, and how it can be interpreted to say that time doesn't exist on its own. But it could also be interpreted to say that time is made of changing matter.

 

[Ginkgo]

Time, as we refer to it, is considered to be relative to your position, but this doesn't exclude the possibility of a linear progression being charted about the universe as a whole. Looking past the integers we use to chart time on the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar, time is a law that dictates the linear flow of space.

 

[WALMART]

No worries! I'm not asking a physicist type of question. As far as I can tell, you say that time is conceptual. You equivocate over "concrete" and "conceptual," but no matter. I don't know if physicists consider Einsteinian space/time geometry to be real. Perhaps some do and some don't. At the very least it is a framework for discussion that has a powerful basis in experiment. And I'm not certain that you've made up your own mind about it.

no, it is difficult for me to make objective statements about subjects such as this.

i edited my original post you quoted this to, i much streamlined my response. when i'd written that i was fairly tired.

 

[ChihuahuaRevolt]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]

Well, if you can invent a metric to measure something that occurs before the metric is invented, then I'd say it necessarily existed before we put a name to it.

Where we got confused is when we made the observation that aging - as in a body slowly breaking down - coincidentally happens with time. Time is more like the measure of the rate at which things happen, so yes if you slow down time, by travelling at large fractions of the speed of light for example, then you age more slowly, but you notice no apparent difference because in doing so you've slowed down the workings of everything. If your life span was 100 local years before you accelerated, then it will still be 100 local years. To those who have not accelerated it might be 200 years, but to you it is still 100.

I agree with what you said in the first few sentences. What I was trying to refer to in my post was more of....
*thinks*

Say I was a caveman, and I walked up to a big plant and named it a tree. Well, the tree would exist even before it had a name, but just because I had walked up and seen it and named it, doesnt mean I know how photosynthesis works, or how the tree helps to provide us oxygen, and so on and so forth. So I think its kind of more like yeah, we gave what we saw as time a name, but we really have no idea what the whole concept of time is, what it really does, or how it affects us.

I'm too tired to really think clearly right now, so I dont know if im making sense or not. Theres a thousand more analogies that come to mind, but they dont really convey what Im trying to get across. I am reminded of how we used to think the earth was flat.

Basically I think is that what we perceive of "time" aka-the earth passing around the sun, is only a very very very small portion of what makes up "time."

The second thing you said I also agree with. Its interesting, the aging of the body. They have several different theories about what causes it. Eventually, your body doesnt make the right proteins anymore, or not enough. Your body just slowly stops functioning like it used to. Skin elasticity goes down, bone strength deteriorates. In medicine you are taught everything that usually goes along with aging, but you are not supposed to expect that is is the cause, because something could be really wrong with the person other than old age, so you cant just attribute it to that.

But basically they dont really know what the true cause of aging is. The best example they have is how a car eventually breaks down with time, so does your body, but it is not "time" that is causing the body to deteriorate. It is other factors that usually can be predicted to happen within a certain time frame

Anyway, Im rambling so......

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]
Sounds about right to me.

I've pretty much concluded some time ago that all we really do is come up with models that are only an approximation of reality, and I think we're fine so long as we don't confuse conceptual models with 'the real thing'.

It's like how we might picture current eddies in a material and think of the electrons or whatever as little balls swirling around like water. That probably is not literally what happens, it's an abstraction, but it's a useful enough abstraction to make predictions by.

The same with treating a cold virus as a spirit that jumps from person to person. It's a useful abstraction insofar that it could predict that if someone is sick, you're liable to catch it if you hang around them.

 

[ChihuahuaRevolt]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]
Sounds about right to me.

I've pretty much concluded some time ago that all we really do is come up with models that are only an approximation of reality, and I think we're fine so long as we don't confuse conceptual models with 'the real thing'.

It's like how we might picture current eddies in a material and think of the electrons or whatever as little balls swirling around like water. That probably is not literally what happens, it's an abstraction, but it's a useful enough abstraction to make predictions by.

The same with treating a cold virus as a spirit that jumps from person to person. It's a useful abstraction insofar that it could predict that if someone is sick, you're liable to catch it if you hang around them.

True that.

That reminds me, it was in the same documentary that I was talking about before, and Im totally about to derail this thread for a second, ready everyone?

It said that our mind basically predicts things for us and fill in the blanks. (Sight wise) Its like that test that is a picture of two dolphins next to each other, or two naked people having sex. If you have never seen naked people, and you dont know what sex is, you will see two dolphins. If you have seen naked people, and know what sex is supposed to look like, you see two naked people having sex.

Aslo, I bet you can raed tihs cnat you?

So they said, that at the time good 'ol friendly columbus came over to Amurika to steal the land from the natives, they never saw him coming, because they had never seen a boat before, so they literally, just did not even see it. This main indian guy kept going out to look at the waters every day, because he noticed the water looked different. Once he realized that there were these odd waves coming out from nothing, then he was able to realize something was on the water, and he was magically able to see the ships.

Interesting, I dont know how true that is. BUT the thought of possibilities of the things that exist, that we just cant see because we dont "know" about it, is amazing.

So know we know all those people who have seen UFO's are just full of it.

/derail over

Please continue.

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]

There's also allegedly a phenomenon where people quite regularly see things that aren't actually there but they appear to be so normal that they don't even know it.

An example would be walking down the street and seeing a normal trash can but it isn't actually there. It's not unusual, or out of place, so we just accept that we see it. Supposedly everyone does this all the time with little things that don't matter.

I have no idea how valid this actually is, but I find it interesting and amusing to consider.

 

[ygolo]

It depends on what exactly we are denoting with the word "time". In addition, I am not sure if the perception we have of things progressing from moment to moment according to the laws of thermodynamics is an illusion or real.

 

[ChihuahuaRevolt]

[MENTION=16143]ChihuahuaRevolt[/MENTION]

There's also allegedly a phenomenon where people quite regularly see things that aren't actually there but they appear to be so normal that they don't even know it.

An example would be walking down the street and seeing a normal trash can but it isn't actually there. It's not unusual, or out of place, so we just accept that we see it. Supposedly everyone does this all the time with little things that don't matter.

I have no idea how valid this actually is, but I find it interesting and amusing to consider.

Me too! Crazy how the mind works.....I wonder what happens when people "see" ghost or shadowy figures and such. I wonder if its the brain playing tricks on them or if there is actually something out there.

 

[Mal12345]

In a vacuum with absolutely no objects there would be no apparent time. But we also would not be there to observe this lack of apparent time.

Is time really a thing completely unto itself? I say no. It's a metric, like size, or velocity. If there's a vacuum of nothing then there's also no apparent size or velocity either, because relative things depend on stuff being there.

So time is a metric, which I take to mean it's a concept. Then in what manner do you experience time? Not through a concept, I hope.

 

[sprinkles]

So time is a metric, which I take to mean it's a concept. Then in what manner do you experience time? Not through a concept, I hope.

Probably the same manner we experience something that goes fast, or a tree that is tall. Discrete measurements are an arbitrary metric but the thing that they measure is not necessarily the same deal.

The way I'm talking about time, as in what a clock shows, is kind of like a ruler. Nothing really is divided up conveniently into discrete meters but discrete meters can be used to measure something in a meaningful way. Similarly, time is not divided up conveniently into discrete seconds but we have a metric to measure it in a meaningful way.

We seem to know that there's a 'space' between one event and another almost dimensionally, and that there's pretty much always something in between.

Just about everything can be interpreted as an illusion given the right context.

 

[Mal12345]

It depends on what exactly we are denoting with the word "time". In addition, I am not sure if the perception we have of things progressing from moment to moment according to the laws of thermodynamics is an illusion or real.

Well that's the question, isn't it? But if you don't recognize having an intuition of time, then I think you're just thinking too hard about this. Because time is something we take for granted all our lives without the necessity of bringing in laws of thermodynamics.

 

[Mal12345]

Probably the same manner we experience something that goes fast, or a tree that is tall. Discrete measurements are an arbitrary metric but the thing that they measure is not necessarily the same deal.

The way I'm talking about time, as in what a clock shows, is kind of like a ruler. Nothing really is divided up conveniently into discrete meters but discrete meters can be used to measure something in a meaningful way. Similarly, time is not divided up conveniently into discrete seconds but we have a metric to measure it in a meaningful way.

We seem to know that there's a 'space' between one event and another almost dimensionally, and that there's pretty much always something in between.

Just about everything can be interpreted as an illusion given the right context.

According to some physics I've read this year - I've since lost the source - time really is divided up into discrete units. Bits of reality move past your perception like the frames in a movie, giving the illusion of reality. Only they move so fast that there is no possibility of perceiving time as discrete units.

I searched around and found this page:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Does-Time-Really-Exist-61530.shtml
"Ferenc Krausz in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has managed to do this by using ultraviolet laser pulses to detect the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms, an event lasting roughly 100 attoseconds (100 quintillionths of a second). Like a second in 300 million years.

But even so, on the Planck scale, attoseconds would be like eons. The scale would define a region where distances and intervals are so short that the concepts of time and space start to disappear."

 

[Mal12345]

Probably the same manner we experience something that goes fast, or a tree that is tall. Discrete measurements are an arbitrary metric but the thing that they measure is not necessarily the same deal.

The way I'm talking about time, as in what a clock shows, is kind of like a ruler. Nothing really is divided up conveniently into discrete meters but discrete meters can be used to measure something in a meaningful way. Similarly, time is not divided up conveniently into discrete seconds but we have a metric to measure it in a meaningful way.

We seem to know that there's a 'space' between one event and another almost dimensionally, and that there's pretty much always something in between.

Just about everything can be interpreted as an illusion given the right context.

According to some physics I've read this year - I've since lost the source - time really is divided up into discrete units. Bits of reality move past your perception like the frames in a movie, giving the illusion of reality. Only they move so fast that there is no possibility of perceiving time as discrete units.

I searched around and found this page:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Does-Time-Really-Exist-61530.shtml
"Ferenc Krausz in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has managed to do this by using ultraviolet laser pulses to detect the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms, an event lasting roughly 100 attoseconds (100 quintillionths of a second). Like a second in 300 million years.

But even so, on the Planck scale, attoseconds would be like eons. The scale would define a region where distances and intervals are so short that the concepts of time and space start to disappear."

 

[sprinkles]

According to some physics I've read this year - I've since lost the source - time really is divided up into discrete units. Bits of reality move past your perception like the frames in a movie, giving the illusion of reality. Only they move so fast that there is no possibility of perceiving time as discrete units.

I searched around and found this page:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Does-Time-Really-Exist-61530.shtml
"Ferenc Krausz in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has managed to do this by using ultraviolet laser pulses to detect the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms, an event lasting roughly 100 attoseconds (100 quintillionths of a second). Like a second in 300 million years.

But even so, on the Planck scale, attoseconds would be like eons. The scale would define a region where distances and intervals are so short that the concepts of time and space start to disappear."

Interesting article.

The thing about quanta is that a lot of stuff that we perceive just simply falls apart at that level. Interestingly in that article it even says:

A peculiar trait of the waves is that they can exist in an infinite number in the same location. Quanta could be piled together in just one dimensionless point.

"Space and time in some sense melt in this picture. There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space," said Rovelli.

One big problem between general relativity and quantum theory is that large bodies - large in the sense of watermelons or people - simply don't act the same way.

Gently placing your hand on a table is a marked difference from slamming down on it quickly, and slamming on it quickly is a marked difference from pressing on it very hard.

If this were only attributed to mass then you wouldn't be able to apply more pressure than your body weight, but you can apply more pressure than your weight. So maybe space has something to do with it? Well, with space and mass, even if you move somehow with a fixed velocity that magically works without time, you still wouldn't be able to apply more pressure than your mass.

However, if you have velocity, you can gain mass. Hence, just standing up won't break your legs because it's only the mass of your body but if you jump off a building you have more mass and therefore hit with more force, and are liable to break something. Where does this extra mass come from? It comes from velocity. How can we factor velocity, without time?

 

[xisnotx]

I'll argue for real with the understanding time is the recognition of change.

Change is real. Time is too.

But it comes down to a more basic question...how do you seperate what's real from what's illusionary? Solipsism?

Unless you become a sensist. Even what is sensed as real but it isn't physical is acceptable as real. It opens up the door for happiness being real, love. A nice thought...

 

[disregard]

The concept of time is perhaps one of the most interesting subjects of all.