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Should We Believe In A Timeline Paradigm?


Mattzy

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The use of a timeline is fine in everyday practice. Recorded history behind and the future in front. We can conveniently measure and compare intervals between events, make predictions etc. but can we reasonably depict time itself in the same way?

I have seen time depicted as a moving line, conveniently going across a flat surface (usually from left to right) along this line there is some moving object. In this paradigm we can describe a curve and draw wonderful conclusions.

If we look around us we see no moving timeline sweeping across the universe. We see only the existence of matter and energy.

Even if time itself does exist (I know there is eternal debate on that) how can we base any theory on such a representation?

This goes to another question: In the old fashioned steady state universe (ref. Fred Hoyle) without beginning or end in any way, could we simply exclude time as a fallacy and reasonably snub any theory based on its existence?  (I'm not making a statement here.)

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Friend,

 

Time itself is a highly ineffable concept.

 

By way of analogy, let us suppose that we are 2-dimensional and that our universe exists in a reel of old fashioned movie film.

 

We experience life as a sequential affair as the images are projected onto a screen one frame at a time.

 

However, a 3-dimensional being—like a projectionist—can stand to one side and see the whole reel at one glance—from the earliest beginnings to the very end.

 

In this theory, time is an illusion. It is an artifact of our inability to perceive it all at once and in truth—Everything is Always Happening.

 

I don't necessarily buy the "Everything is Always Happening" version of time—but it is one way to view time.

 

Also, any analogy can be pushed too far. There doesn't need to be a hyper-dimensional observer for the universe to be "A roll of film."

 

 

…..Saxon Violence

 

 

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There is such a thing as a worldline - a well-explored and rigorous mathematical idea that history has to be connected. In a sense, time binds the history of a worldline together. The stranger aspects of quantum mechanics demonstrates that a particle can have more than one worldline. That is... if it is not guided by a pilot wave, in which case, those ''many histories'' would translate as an effect from a deterministic trajectory in which these waves guide a particle along a defined path in both space and time.

 

I prefer to call it, a timescape - as opposed to a spacescape, just as we tend to call it a landscape when we see a mountain on the horizon. The past cone, present sphere and the future cone, have to be connected through time, but time is so ill-defined in general relativity, we will require quantum mechanics to understand what may seem at first, contradictory.

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Thankyou both for the "time" you put in there. I'm none the wiser - only more doubtful about anything but the present (but that's entirely intuitive).

 

Then you did learn something, because intuition is not the sole cause of knowing about the present moment, this is an asymptotic experience of most observers on the planet. 

Edited by Dubbelosix
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I think it is indeed possible to learn something without realising it - as seems to be the case for yours truly at the moment.

As you seem to be willing to indulge me 006, I will ask you another question on time.

What is wrong with the concept of time as a fallacy of the human mind? I can conceive everything as nothing more than existence without end or beginning in any way. I can easily conceive the past as no longer existing and the future as not yet happened. We see only change.

What argument is there to oppose that idea? Is it the problems surrounding relativity and the speed of light?

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There are significant problems bridging the gap of the concept of time in quantum mechanics and that with relativity - the former being concerned with discrete processes and the latter being concerned with continuous dynamics. It is interesting to note that recently it has been demonstrated that time can be both be quantized and continuous...

 

When it comes to the human mind, we have internal chronometers known with origins in the hypothalamus ( located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus) as the central mechanism behind the presence of a special clock of the brain which is called the chronograph. When this doesn't work for a very rare few individuals, they have quite literally, no sense of time.

 

So the time we experience is still loosely connected to the sense of time found in physics, but of course, we experience a linear time when time is not a linear thing in general relativity, it is part of a geometric property.

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Then I declare myself (admittedly cautiously at this early stage - but based on my natural intuition) an adherent to Machian physics as (dogmatically) there can only be change. I don't think we "experience a linear time" we may be conditioned to believing it to be so as this is how it is so commonly depicted.

The dogmatic statement that there is only change is a satisfyingly simple assumption. If challenges use more complex assumptions then it seems they are less likely to be correct - I read that nature usually proves this - although the search is rarely simple.

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Then I declare myself (admittedly cautiously at this early stage - but based on my natural intuition) an adherent to Machian physics as (dogmatically) there can only be change. I don't think we "experience a linear time" we may be conditioned to believing it to be so as this is how it is so commonly depicted.

The dogmatic statement that there is only change is a satisfyingly simple assumption. If challenges use more complex assumptions then it seems they are less likely to be correct - I read that nature usually proves this - although the search is rarely simple.

 

Why do you keep using the word ''dogmatic?''

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Einstein comes to the rescue with his nonsensical statement that time is what clocks measure. Time and clocks are no more related than coffee being defined as something cups measure. When you slow a clock or a metabolic rate with cold are you slowing time or just a clock? Sure a wood frog goes into hibernation and the entire winter looks to him like time was stopped. The temperature has reduced the amount of change so if you now define time as the amount of change, your lowering of the temperature must have affected time itself. It hasn't. The assumption is wrong because if the time rate is based on the amount of change, there would be slow and fast rates of time interspersed all over space and there is absolutely no evidence of that. Does time move slower in Arkansas than it does in L.A.? I showed in the other thread how the speed of light (not clocks) is intimately related with the rate of time and the universal max rate of information transfer which regulates amount of change not vice versa. The facts from this assumption are consistent when the doppler shift ratio shows apparent rates through time outside the norm. You`re more arguing time is controlled by how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and while that`s fascinating to the wiki crowd, it`s not to the thinking crowd.

 

PS. And Einstein's other ideas on time that it is just another coordinate dimension of space with no flow or direction, that past, present and future all exist concurrently and that there are infinite personal perspective presents are a testament to how wrong he was about everything.

Edited by ralfcis
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Why do you keep using the word ''dogmatic?''

 

Why do you keep using the word ''dogmatic?''

 

Good question. 'Arrogant' would have been a better choice. I like the idea. I think I'm right. But in actual fact I don't truly know that I'm right. So saying so makes me feel arrogant.
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As always ralfcis, great to hear your thoughts - and as always I will have to ponder on them. I have been thinking about your transfer rate (did I just say something on another thread?) It seems that light speed fixes this rate. If information is sent at light speed and can only arrive at light speed then distortion (slowing or speeding up) is not allowed between people at any distance - only delay.

I haven't thought about what you said above yet. You are talking to one of Einstein's barmaids.

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Does time move slower in Arkansas than it does in L.A.?

 

I think those two spots are mostly concurrent, but Iceland is a bit whacky along with India and the Solomon Islands.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-03/esa-generates-most-sophisticated-geoid-yet-goces-gravity-data

 

 

The use of a timeline is fine in everyday practice. Recorded history behind and the future in front. We can conveniently measure and compare intervals between events, make predictions etc. but can we reasonably depict time itself in the same way?

I have seen time depicted as a moving line...

Debateable as time is beyond the ever onward march of entropy...The idea of a timeline is often best considered from the perspective of a movie reel or a cassette tape IMHO. Much like Saxxon puts out in #2.

 

Even looking out at the sky, it's more like you're looking at different parts of a movie reel, or often listening to a few different spots on a cassette at the same time.

 

There's some neat fiction that massages people into being able to cope with some of the stranger non-fiction ideas. All Of An Instant, which can make some passing ideas and neat visuals on both steady state and flowing time. It's of course utterly wrong, but at the same time a useful wading pool to splash around in concepts before cracking open stuff like Time Crystals and superconductor-like-space-time-crystalline structures the other oddly counter-intuitive bits Wilzec and others go with. (Really bad wording, but English is not really precise enough for this concept without a book or two behind it)

 

 

Edited by GAHD
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Einstein comes to the rescue with his nonsensical statement that time is what clocks measure. Time and clocks are no more related than coffee being defined as something cups measure. When you slow a clock or a metabolic rate with cold are you slowing time or just a clock? Sure a wood frog goes into hibernation and the entire winter looks to him like time was stopped. The temperature has reduced the amount of change so if you now define time as the amount of change, your lowering of the temperature must have affected time itself. It hasn't. The assumption is wrong because if the time rate is based on the amount of change, there would be slow and fast rates of time interspersed all over space and there is absolutely no evidence of that. Does time move slower in Arkansas than it does in L.A.? I showed in the other thread how the speed of light (not clocks) is intimately related with the rate of time and the universal max rate of information transfer which regulates amount of change not vice versa. The facts from this assumption are consistent when the doppler shift ratio shows apparent rates through time outside the norm. You`re more arguing time is controlled by how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and while that`s fascinating to the wiki crowd, it`s not to the thinking crowd.

 

PS. And Einstein's other ideas on time that it is just another coordinate dimension of space with no flow or direction, that past, present and future all exist concurrently and that there are infinite personal perspective presents are a testament to how wrong he was about everything.

I think Einstein was making the same point (but briefly) about time. But he was asking the community to re-conceive and consider spacetime as a new concept. I ask again about your transfer rate: The doppler shift marks the rate of change in distance - but its not important. The outgoing rate of info is the same as the incoming rate (the max rate of transfer - as you say) so the max transfer rate is fixed by the speed of light. Is that what you are saying?

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