TIME

So how does it work? And I don't mean the "artificial definition" of time in hours and minutes, but more like the passing of time, the difference between past, present and future.

Leaving religion out of this discussion, let's assume the world was created some 40 billion years ago, what came before that? And before that? And before that? Does that mean the past is infinite? And if so...if we also assume the future is infinite what does that say about the present?

I mean I always get stuck with this question when I assume that life/growth is bound to time.

For example a seed needs a certain amount of time to grow into a plant. If there would be no time, as in passing of hours minutes etc. the seed would not be able to grow into a plant, because it will always remain in the same stage of a seed. Unless you assume that the seed can be multiple stages at the same time. That would mean that time is not a chronological order of events but time are "stages"/"events" happening all at the same moment which could be one possibility. However if that is so, then why are we as human beings perceiving time in a chronological order [as in past, present, future]?

If we accept this idea of time being a "chronological order of events" and that passing of time is required for the seed to grow into a plant then what does that say about the past? What I mean by this is that, if we assume this is true that would mean that there could be no creation, no growth, without the passing of time, cos if time doesn't pass the seed will always remain a seed. Which would mean that everything in our universe could not have existed/evolved without the passing of time, which means that "the passing of time" has always been there. Which would eventually mean that our past is just as infinite as our future...?!?

...

so...what do you think girlfriends? Because my brain srsly can't process this mess?!

Oh yeah I don't think I need to remind people but I'm still going to; no religion please !

Cracking your brain doesn't sound very healthy.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

Well, see since I'm Irken and I am already floating around in some distant solar system plotting my eventual take over of a planet I already have an amazing sense of time and what it means.

It means that your time is limited on your rock. As we aim to destroy you all. We'll be taking your snacks. We've already got an agent on your planet, albeit...he's stupid. But NO MATTER!! He's there and eventually, we will take over your planet you pitiful HU-MANS!

Personally, I don't get why people find it so hard to believe that the universe was all already here.

Of course there is the theory of the big bang, then the whole God thing, but can't we all just agree that the universe was just here? I mean, people find it easy to believe that God was "just here", so why is it hard to believe it was the universe instead?

So, pretty much, time is an invention of man. There is no "time", it's just what we call the processes everything goes through in the same order. So, a banana decaying simply decays over "time", but we don't really need to calculate it. It just happens.

I can't figure out emoticons when on my phone, I was going for that yellow one running in circles.
Anyone know how to do that one?
I sorta thought it was suitable for this sort of thread.

No time without space. No space without time. Imagine if there was time without space. What would it measure? What would happen? Nothing. Imagine space without time. What would change? What would happen? nothing. Time measures movement, vibrations, changes of state. Space is the medium in which things change with time. You could say there was time before and after space, but what is the point of it?

Nobody in the world knows what time is, it just is.

You couldn't say there was time before and after space, for the very reasons you already mentioned. Without space, time is more than without point, it simply doesn't exist.

Actually, time does exist and it's not the same for everything. You've heard Einstein's theory of relativity, haven't you?

I've heard of it, I haven't actually heard it though.

What's it say?

That you can use the equations to find the relationships between objects moving at different speeds or in differently accelerating frames of reference, with differently moving local clocks. Time may move differently for different objects, but it really is a theory of relativity, not of differences, it's just very complicated to find the relationships.

[The biggest complication is that gravity wells cause time space to curve, giving a space that obeys Reimannian, not flat, geometry. That's even before you get to time dilation with near light speeds.]

Space and time depend upon the observer and certain properties of them, relative speed and location being the two that come to mind.

As for what came before the Big Bang timewise, I'll let Professor Hawking answer that "It Is Like Asking What Is North of the North Pole".

Life is the universe experiencing itself.

Isn't that just what time is? Time of course isn't equal on everything.

Dogs age faster than humans.

Meat goes bad faster than milk.

I'm sure that every different thing has it's own rate at which it ages. So, time is kind of like algebra. It is always "x", but dependent on what object you're tying "x" to, is the coefficient. For example:

Human = (2x)
Dog = (4x)

"x" is always the same number, but the coefficient isn't.

Idk, makes sense to me that way.

Time doesn't pass. Better to think of the universe as a big four-dimensional region. What we think of as an object enduring through time is better thought of as a series of time-slices of things appropriately connected to each other.

I'm not sure what to say about the phenomenology of time. I don't regard this as a consideration against four-dimensionalism.

More interesting still are various temporal asymmetries. Why, for instance, does causation generally run from past to future? These are most interesting because the fundamental physical laws are time symmetric. It's puzzling how temporal asymmetries can exist at the macroscopic level, without existing at the microscopic level.

Clocks tell me the time.

That is all I care to know, one way or another I'm going to die in the end so I'd rather not think about time.


I let clocks do that for me

http://fisica.ciencias.uchile.cl/~gonzalo/cursos/termo_II-04/seminarios/EJP_Stenger-bigbang_90.pdf

@Dalek, the dog and the man experience the same time. A day is still a day, the same atoms in both vibrate with the same frequency. The problem arise when you have a dog accelarating with the Earth's rotation, and a man so far out in space he is effectively still as far as the Earth revolving below him. Relativity allows both to be brought into one reference framework, and the differences in their local times to be calculated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

Well, I'm not talking about the experience of time, I'm talking about the effect of time.

So, like I said. The coefficient of "x", where "x" is equal to the overall rate of time is the rate in which a certain object/being ages. In my example, the age rate of humans is 2 and the age rate of dogs is 4.

I get it though.

As others have said, linear passage of time is a convenient abstraction created by our brainses. We perceive time and space as two separate things, but they're just aspects of the same wad of cosmic silly putty. Where we "are" in the "time line" is all a matter of our perspective.

More wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Actually, here's Steven Hawking's theory, is that before the universe, time never existed. And then the big bang happened, and time came to be. That was a simplified version of his theory. I don't know if I actually agree with him, though.

We're not talking about rates of growth of objects. The issue is the conventionality of simultaneity.

First off: special relativity. This states that whether two events are simultaneous depends upon a frame of reference (where a frame of reference is a kind of baseline for measuring when objects have undergone acceleration).

Second: general relativity. Think of this as getting rid of the last vestige of some privileged properties of frames of reference. In special relativity we privilege inertial frames of reference. But this seems somewhat dubious. Physics should state laws of relative motion between objects (since that's all there is), and should not privilege a special class of frames of reference. General relativity does this.

Time is a numerical value assigned to observable changes in space. I have no formal education on the theory of relativity, but I can easily state that just because rates of change may be different does not mean that time itself changes. All I get from the theory is that we do not have an instrument or reference point to measure the interaction of forces that effect rates of change.

What you're saying is that time must infinitely regress.

Where Time is but a loop, a loose stitch in the Universal cloth, A streamer might seize upon a chance, a fatal slip- and plunge the fates of planets into chaos.

For your mind to be in a place where time doesn't exist is blissful. Somewhere time doesnt exist, and where it would be a waste of time to think of time. You should try some meditation and things, maybe you might get lucky and experience a moment where time has no meaning.

The past is not infinite. There is no such thing as "before" the universe in our concepts at least (don't want to get into the idea of multiple universes in some sort of giant floating universe-creating membrane thingy) as the idea of "before" has to do with the passage of time, and there was no time before that.

The future is also not infinite. Eventually the universe will die.

The present is an interesting one, though. What we all consider to be the "present" is in fact the past due to the laws of relativity and our senses. The idea of a "present" though is an instantaneous moment, like a point. We live in the past, and around us http://xkcd.com/209/