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Time?


TechKnight

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The problem with every theory involving time is that most fail to realize this: time is NOT a dimension, and therefore it is impossible to travel through time because we humans can only imagine things in and travel through dimensions. Prove that time is a dimension and time travel is possible. But you can't prove that time is a dimension. If you disagree, feel free to respond and explain why.

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It probably depends on how you define a dimension.

 

Time can certainly enter into equations just like spatial dimensions. To me time seems to be unique in only one aspect, it is incredibly difficult to travel through time except in the "preferred" direction if you have mass. And if you are massless, the best you can do is to stay in one place (in time). (In fact that might be all you can do.)

 

At this juncture I don't think it's fair to involve tacyons because they are purely hypothetical and their use in theories usually results in inconsistencies. I'm only aware of one purported detection and it has not been reproduced. Of course if they did exist, that would mean travel in time could be bidirectional, which, I think, would support the idea of time as a dimension.

 

Define dimension, and let the fun begin.

 

So what is a dimension?

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Seems like you may have included "non-physical" in your definition just to be sure it could include time. What other non-physical "objects" exist. Is "non-physical object" an oxymoron? I don't usually think of time as an object. Maybe it's just semantics, but I think of objects as things with limits and boundaries. Is time bounded, or is it limitless? I really don't know the answer.

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i think time can be both, limited and limit-less. I believe it all depends on the situation and circumstances in which you are speaking.

 

Speaking quantitativly, time has boundaries. If i were to ask you for the time, or ask you how old something or someone is, then time has a boundary. A man is 56 years, 35 days etc. old. Or the time is 5:30am. You can define time in those instances. But if i were to ask you how long the universe will be around or when time will end, you can't answer, since no one knows. But not only that, what if you were to fall into a black hole, where time theoretically will stretch into infinity, then you can't define it by any known standard right?

 

Saying that time isn't a dimension simply because it can't be quantified all the time like the 3 spatial dimensions is a bit close minded I think.

Didn't someone important once say that belief is the death of learning?

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There is time Travel though...I'll take a simple example When people go into space and they are traveling at fast speeds, they come back minutes younger than they should. If you do not get this ask I can explain it better, or someone else can surely explain it better than I. So then if you were to Travel at incredible speeds (that which near the speed of light) you would EXPERIENCE time all the same, but the way that the people not moving at these speeds EXPERIENCE time would be percieved by you to be incredibly fast. It's all about perception...if we lived on a diff planet that traveled through space at differant speeds it would all be differant...watch star trek...i think i'm done rambling...

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hey thurstOn... how is it that you came up with your user name? it happens to be my real last name and it also caught my attention that you are also using the same avatar as me... weird coincident?

I also like your signature. I've seen it on many bumper stickers, pins and patches... it reminds me of a few lines from the book "pilgrims passage"....

"...and then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven."

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The only reason i fear my death is for my loved ones , our time here is a precious gift a gift which allows us to explore the beauty in life and the wonderfull biodiversity .... our time is short in our own personal reference frames but when we die we all go to the same place which is bizarly the same place weve always been..... were never alone never can be and carrying a maintenence of slowness that allows us to perceive beauty... concept of time - there is no time just moments.

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In physics, when we say that time is a dimension, it is not an arbitrary attribution. When Relativity Theory appeared, it took some time to someone propose that time could be viewed as a dimension. The first who realized it and coined the expression spacetime was Minkowski. In Relativity, time and space are entangled in a very special way: both together define the metric of the spacetime. It may seem just words without meaning, but the metric of the space is what gives the gravitational force in General Relativity. So, the issue of being or not a dimension is something very deep and not just a matter of convention. Of course there is the mathematical meaning of dimension, but it is another story...

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i think of time as frames. for example if u had a line with a length of X in the first dimension, and then a square with sides X in the second dimension would have an area of X^2. in the third dimension, a cube with sides X would have an area of X^3. in the fourth dimension, time, would be an X amount of cubes, each with an area of X^3. the total area of all the cubes would be X^4. each cube would be a frame of time in which the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (x, y, z) dimensions of any object in the cube could change from one cube to the next.

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The way i see it "time" does not exist. It is simply a mental thought created by us humans to create a schedule. What is "time"? It is not an object, it is an idea. That is why it is not possible to truly travel "through" time; you cannot move through something that does not exist. It is a notion, nothing more. You cannot hold, see, pass through, or truly even prove it's existence except as a measurement of the sun spinning around the Earth. Time does not exist in the sense that a apple does; You can see an apple, feel it, taste it. Time is in our imaginations. You can say that we can travelt through time because we are constantly doing so, even as I write this. However, if our notion of "time" had evolved as to the point where we percieve it as not moving, then the entire notion would be worthless and we would never even think about it. Everything that is real changes. Time does not. It is always the same, becuase it is not real.

 

There may be a "river" of tie, but it is not so much a river as a very small pond emerging just us and moving with us. You cannot leave the pond, much as you cannot leave the so called "river of time" that has been so popular amongst the masses. You cannot change the future because if you go into the future to change something then at the time you are at your present, though it may be the future compared to the place you just left.

 

Comments please

 

agthepoet

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I slightly disagree when you say that time does not exist because you can only measure it and not taste or see it. That´s because "see" and "taste" are only different kinds of measure.

 

We humans have limited instruments (our organs) to make measurements of natural things. See is a limited way of measuring the shape, size, color and distance of objects that emit light in a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Taste is a limited way of measuring the chemical components of a substance. So, our senses do not determine what exists, because they´re limited.

 

On the other way, I think that simply saying that time does not exist is a way of giving up the challenge to understand it. I do not think that your argument that we cannot travel in time implies that it does not exists because I cannot see the connection. Could you explain the argument better?

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It really is an abstract subject, and rather difficult to explain. Time is not a spacial dimension. It doesn't exist as a dimension that you can see and move through. The notion that we call "time" is really just a relization that all things happen in sequence to eachother. We can imagine that "time" is a river that we can swim in, it is impossible. We can slow the passing of it by going extremely fast, and perhaps stop it if we go the speed of light, but we cannot go beyond the speed of light (doesn't einstein say that?) and standing perfectly still won't slow it down.

 

One thing I noticed to enforce my belief that time is a perception and not a dimension is when I can stare at a clock and mentally get the seconds hand to slow down and speed by by slowing down and speeding up my perception of time. When you are bored time seems to go slow because you have nothing to think about except the time, and as you become aware if it's presence in a more vived way it seems to slow down.

 

When you said "our senses do not determine what exists, because they are limited," one could say that though we don't sense everything that is real, but everything that we sense is real. The second statement is true in the sense that everything we sense is real in the way that we sensed it, but not neccasarily in the way that we infer it to be. When you see a mirage of water in the desert, the image of the mirage is real but the inferred reality of water is false. The same thing can happen with time. Our perception of it is real, however the inferred conslusion that we can travel through it at will is false. Time is all in our imaginations, and you cannot travel into new places and times through pure imagination.

 

Alex

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I just posted in the other Time thread, but this discussion is interesting too. In my other post I explain why I believe time does not exist.

 

Another idea that ocurred to me is that accepting the existence of time seemed to create more questions than it resolved. If the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model is true (quantumly, everything that *can* happen *does* happen, in a different universe) then this would mean there are almost an infinite number of universes all coinciding in space and time. How such a complex system would ever function seems rediculous to even contemplate.

 

To me, this approach creates a much overly complicated situation that is completely resolved if you simply accept that time does not exist, as observation would suggest (and complying to Occam's razor?).

 

Without time, all of the strange time travel paradoxes simply disappear.. without time there IS no time travel. This doesn't break Relativity or anything, as like I mentioned in the other post, math itself is a conceptual hallucination. It's very useful for inferring things from our universe, and time can still be used traditionally in equations, but is itself not Reality, and it's value is completely subjective.

 

Time-dilation (the odd fact that "time" moves slower the faster you are moving) almost seems to justify that time is a complete non-factor. Everything is seperated by the distance information must travel to begin with, so two people could *never* have exactly syncronized clocks without occupying the same space, which is impossible.

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