so time isn't absolute
No, your frame of reference along the time dimension; ie; the "present", isn't absolute- it's relative. Amazingly, as Einstein first claimed so many years ago, your "present" is relative to your *velocity*!
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This has nothing to do with time, light simply didn't arrive yet.---
Nope, the space inbetween Earth and Mars LITERALLY appears to be at a different length when you travel close to the speed of light (which is how fast you would need to go to notice the relativity of the "present"). Simply changing the speed at which you travel actually seems to alter your perception of the distances, but the utterly amazing thing is that this effect is NOT merely an illusion; the rate of the passage of time as measured on your rocket LITERALLY changes to compensate! Any clock you carry on board your rocket will show a different time than the ones on Earth once you stop traveling at close to light speed.
Unbelievable as it might seem, time *literally passed more slowly*, not just in your head; clocks don't have a "perception of the universe"!
This has been proven with REAL clocks traveling at very high velocities (not remotely close to the speed of light but fast enough to exhibit enough of a change that can be measured and verified); in fact, without compensating for this effect, GPS in cars and phones wouldn't work properly!
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Then it put quite a bit of how people try to say time doesn't exist. Ok.... not my reasoning there, I plainly say it exists as long as we can measure it but it does not mean it really does---
It exists as plainly as anything else you can measure with a ruler or tape; a clock is just a measuring device in which each tick represents an equal unit of "length". Time exists as surely as my computer desk does.
Of course, you're free to say that my desk doesn't exist but that's a whole different line of thought!
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the past is a recollection of events, we can't go to it. It doesn't exist anymore. That is my argument.---
Ahhh, now we're getting to it!!
THIS is the heart of the confusion! ...because you see, according to Einstein
THAT is the illusion! According to Einstein, the past DOES exist...in fact, the past exists RIGHT NOW and is just as real as what you perceive as the "present"!...and not only that, but the future exists RIGHT NOW, and like the past, it has always existed! More on this below...
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We remember the past, not the universe, or time.---
Well, to be clear; you do remember the universe; indeed, that's ALL you remember because everything you interact with (including YOU yourself) *IS* the universe. The reason humans can only remember the past seems to be a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Entropic arrow of time. The human brain's ability to form memories relies on thermodynamics:
http://www.ipod.org....row_of_time.asp---
Now if we had a machine to predict to future, it'd need pretty every variable or at least enough variables that can effect it. It is possible, but I wonder how the machine will take into account the new observer into its calculation. But it doesn't mean the future already happened, it's a calculation of all data that how it goes about to create the future.---
Technically, that's possible; but that has nothing to do with "Time" as defined by Einstein because in Einstein's universe, the future is NOT "created", the future just IS.
Look at it this way:
Say we're looking at a street; you wouldn't say that one end of the street hasn't been "created" just because you haven't reached it yet. If you were in the middle of the street, you wouldn't say that the beginning of the street "doesn't exist anymore" and the end "doesn't exist yet". ALL points on the street exist and ALL points on the street are "real", no matter what your location on the street happens to be.
According to Einstein, that's time. Time is like a stretch of road or a length of string; all points exist. The Roman Empire exists and is just as real as some unknown Earth society in the year 3,000AD; both exist RIGHT NOW as you're reading this....but neither exists
within your frame of reference. Your birth, your life, your death already exist but that *length of time* doesn't coincide with the Roman Empire or the year 3,000AD so from your point of view, the Roman Empire is behind you and 3,000AD is in front of you...but that's just your frame of reference! All frames of reference along the timeline are equally valid.
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And still, sometimes entropy reverses itself (though usually goes towards disorder much more everywhere else), In that instance, did time reverse?---
No closed system has *ever* been definitively shown to have "reverse entropy" AFAIK. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has *never* been violated AFAIK. If you know of a case in which it was verified to have been violated, I'd love to hear about it.
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Now people here been talking about the universe being very ordered at start and disordered now. I am not so sure how true that is.---
This has *always* been the position of modern physics since the advent of the Big Bang theory and, indeed, the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself.
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If we heat water it causes disorder, if we cool them down they are back to order.---
Hehe, that's not "reverse entropy"; you're confused by the terms "order and disorder" and you're forgetting that
a) heat doesn't simply "disappear" from the universe into nothing when something goes from hot to cold
b) the water is not isolated from the rest of the universe
The water might stop boiling, but by heating it you've inextricably and irreversibly
*increased the "disorder" in your kitchen* and, believe it or not, the universe itself. Physics makes no distinction between the molecules of water in your pot or the molecules of air around it; they're both part of the same system.
Some basics to take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia......and_disorder)http://en.wikipedia....ergy_dispersal)---
Space at the time did not exist, the singularity was all there was.---
Nope, the singularity *WAS* space.
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I'd argue it was probably very disordered then, it was a super boiling water, wasn't it?---
Actually, the complete opposite is true; the point of the singularity describes
the *most* possibly ordered state the universe could ever be in! Even if you take the singularity to be nothing more than a mathematical fabrication, the whole point is that it's a description of space in its most ordered form; the entire universe comprising a point infinitely small!
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And then they claim it erupted and went everywhere, but there was nowhere to go? So space itself expands to make the space.---
Nope, you've got it all wrong; you're probably caught up in the "Bang" part of it which gets people every time...
The singularity did not "erupt", it did not "explode" and have nowhere to go. Remember, the singularity *WAS* space itself! It merely expanded; it expanded VERY rapidly. We don't know exactly why, but that's pretty much what the Big Bang is- the sudden and very rapid expansion of space.
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Therefore the expansion of space has to let order, the universe is cooling down from boiling in theory. The more we expand the more order created because the heat is down, by your theories logic.---
Nope. You're misunderstanding what's meant by "order" and what entropy actually is...
From the Wikipedia article I linked above:
"Such descriptions have tended to be used together with commonly used terms such as disorder and chaos which are ambiguous, and whose everyday meaning is the opposite of what they are intended to mean in thermodynamics. ... The description of entropy as the amount of "mixedupness" or "disorder," as well as the abstract nature of the statistical mechanics grounding this notion, can lead to confusion and considerable difficulty for those beginning the subject.[2][3] Even though courses emphasised microstates and energy levels, most students could not get beyond simplistic notions of randomness or disorder. Many of those who learned by practising calculations did not understand well the intrinsic meanings of equations, and there was a need for qualitative explanations of thermodynamic relationships. ... To overcome the difficulties described in the previous section, entropy can be exposited in terms of "energy dispersal" and the "spreading of energy," while carefully avoiding all mention of "disorder" and "chaos" except when explaining misconceptions. All explanations of where and how energy is dispersing or spreading have been recast in terms of energy disperal, so as to emphasise the underlying qualitative meaning."---
logically looking at it I think physics are quite in reverse here.---
Nah, you're just making a basic layperson's mistake in your understanding of entropy. Like I said, it's common.
Wikipedia should help clear up a bit of the basics for you.
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They mentioned quantum physics and the Cat Experiment pretty much. I'd say just because you lack the data and math it doesn't mean you can't do it or that you are right. I think there is a lot more to look into quantum physics before sci-fi excuses are made. I want to point that he said one of the difficulties is combining Quantum Mechanics with Time. Again there's time making no sense then.---
Hmmm...not quite sure what you're saying here.
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So that paper pretty much proves nothing, it is mainly a philosophical argument and unfortunately we can't prove anything in philosophy, just describe things and in this case what we might *believe* in.---
If you're referring to the Paul Davies article, you're perfectly entitled to believe that it's 100% wrong (just like you're entitled to believe anything you want to), but it's not a philosophical argument.
Davies is merely summing up Einstein's description of Time according to General Relativity, which has been solidly verified by direct observation and evidence for many, many decades now.
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The mars and light travel, well, it takes sound time to get to you to, just because you see this and hear that doesn't make a difference.---
You missed the point of the example; the point is that
time literally slows down for someone traveling at close to light speed *relative* to those who are not. The clock on the rocket ship would actually show a DIFFERENT time than the clocks on Mars and Earth despite the fact that it was synchronized with them and nobody tampered with it!
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Time exists only as long as you can measure it---
Yep, that's how we know time exists.
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and only the now does.---
Well, this is another bag of worms (man this subject is a real labyrinth, isn't it?) but according to Einstein, Paul Davies, and much of the rest of the physics establishment, "the now" actually doesn't exist!...at least not the way you think it does. According to Einstein, there is no special "now moment"; in other words, there is no evidence in physics and no reason to believe that any moment in time is special or different from any other. If you could travel back in time to the year 1805 and ask Napoleon "Is this the present?", he would say "Yes,
now it is the present."
And you would have said the same thing yesterday...and the day before...and you'll say the same thing tonight. It's "now" while you're reading this sentence but it was also "now" when you just started reading this entire post and it will be "now" when you finish reading this sentence.
Every point in time appears to be "now" to the observer, therefore "now" is relative, it's observer-dependent; and because all frames of reference in time are equally valid, you might as well say that "now" doesn't exist.That's time according to Einstein's physics.
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A lot of what physics deals with now days is philosophy.---
Where our tools of investigation are inadequate, scientists have no alternative but to make an educated guess; this is no different than what the first astronomers did with telescopes that were no better than those used on ships. It's no different than what a crime scene investigator does when his technology isn't capable of giving him the full picture. Since everyone on these forums is well aware of the exponential nature of technological progress, things that might seem to be "philosophy" to you today will be physically verified by the tools of the future; the Large Hadron Collider is one such tool.
Edited by Xanthus, 14 February 2010 - 02:41 AM.
LongeCity
