Farsight

Klaynos: I'm trying explain rather than define, trying to give the grasp and understanding that maths just doesn't offer to the layman. Do take the trouble to read this thread along with TIME EXPLAINED and MONEY EXPLAINED. I hope to post MASS EXPLAINED sometime this week.

It is a tricky one jck.

If I ask you what a photon is made out of, you'd say energy. If I asked you what a wave in the surf is made out of, you'd say energy again. But there's got to be some moving water to have the energy. Like there has to be something to the space so that it can have the energy of the photon.

Maybe space can only be considered to exist if it has energy. I could go with that.

Hmmmn. Ouroborus.

Farsight, this was a real well done presentation.

 

Am I correct in assuming that you are saying that 'time', 'motion', and 'change' are interchangable terms?

 

Can I also assume that oscillations and oscillations percieved as frequency play a big part in your conceptual framework?

 

My past pov has postulated that all the rest of reality is 'time dependent', but I think I could go with 'motion dependent' and/or 'change dependent'. You are making a good case.

aguy2

aguy2:

Thanks.

I think motion and change are pretty close, but time's a measure of motion against other motion, so I wouldn't say "time is change" myself. But I know what people mean when they say it, and agree with the sense of it.

Yes, I think those oscillations are important. I'm not so sure about frequency though, because its definition relies on time being the thing we take for granted. If a photon experiences no time because it travels at c, it can't really have a frequency the way we commonly understand it.

It's a really interesting subject is this. And so many other things get so much simpler.

Nothing can go faster than the "speed of light" in a vacuum because c is not a speed. It's not a speed because speed is distance over time, and time is not a fundamental component of the thing we call spacetime. What is fundamental is space, and it can only be quantified by distance. You can measure this distance by looking at some distance travelled by a photon. When you try to measure time to calculate distance / time = speed, what you're actually measuring is the distance travelled by the photons within your body, brain, and clock. The constant you call c is how you relate the real Dimension of distance to the mathematical, subjective, imaginary dimension you call time.

See this paper descibing A New Interpretation of Special Relativity:

A New Interpretation of Special Relativity

Maybe you should show the essay to your roommate, psynapse. It's quite difficult to get your head round it.

If the sun explodes now it explodes now. It's 8 light minutes away so we won't know about it for another 8 minutes. But it's really contorted confused thinking to say the sun exists 8 minutes in our past. Because then we'd exist 8 minutes in the sun's past, and you just tie yourself in knots. The sun is shining now.

Edtharan: you'll never get it because you don't want to get it. Because to you square A is a different colour to B, and you'll swear blind forever that black is white.

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm

All: please can we use this TIME EXPLAINED thread hereon, and refer back to the other one where necessary.

I think I understand time and energy and mass and light and other phenomena. I mean to explain all these things in essays that a layman can grasp. Meanwhile:

There's no travelling faster than light.

Trigger, it sounds to me as if you're thinking along the right lines.

Edtharan:

You're wrong about the Twins Paradox. Really. Einstein tried to explain it using acceleration in 1918 and was "erroneous". But don't take my word for it. Look it up yourself. Look up "passing clocks". That's where clock A is moving with respect to clock B. Clock C is also moving with respect to clocks A and B, but in the opposite direction at twice the velocity. The situation looks like this:

C---->A<--B

What I'm saying is time is derived from your measure of your motion in comparison to other motion. So it's subjective to you. If time is subjective that means spacetime is not "spacetime", it's space. When you move through this space the distances in the direction of motion appear reduced. But the space is not actually contracted. When two relativistic objects pass you by, you see them flattened, but not the gap between them. You don't flatten the spherical rotating sun down to a dinner plate when you head towards it. What's subjective is that contraction of space that goes hand in hand with your time dilation. Space is objective. It's there. Like Einstein said in 1920, it's the aether.

Read this paper offering an alternative interpretation of Special Relativity. Note the "sonar time".

http://home.att.net/~SolidUniverse/Relativity/Relativity.html

And to back that up, the nudge travels at the speed of sound in that rigid metal bar. For steel this is about 5000 metres per second. Way less than the speed of light.

Aw FFS. What is this?

;315981'']All of the relevations about the nature of time that I see online always bug me... and this thing I just read explained nothing at all.

Bah, what thing you just read. You didn't even read it.

And nor did Edtharan.

So frequency is a number of events per second. And a second is a number of some other events. The interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. For time is a measure of events, of change, measured by and against some other change. And for things to change, something, somewhere, somehow, has to have motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time.

Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You form a mental map of the world using your senses and your brain. You use this mental map to think, and you are so immersed in it that you can’t see things the way they really are. You are locked into an irrational conviction that clocks run, that days pass, and that journeys take a length of time.

It takes an open mind, and logic to break out of this conditioning. First of all we need to look at your senses and the things you experience. Let’s start with sight. Look at the picture below:

The central portions of the two crosses are the same colour. You think the one on the left is grey and the one on the right is yellow. Not true. Tear a small hole in a piece of paper to make a peephole to mask out the context. Hold it up to one image after the other, and you realise that the central portion of the right-hand image really is grey. The yellow was the illusion. What does this tell you? It tells you that something you took for granted is not true. And it should remind you that a photon doesn’t have a colour. It has a wavelength, an oscillation, a motion.

Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.

Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. You can feel it when I shake your hand. But you know you can’t measure the pressure of an atom, because pressure isn’t a fundamental property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us it’s derived from motion.

How about kinetic energy? A cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s has kinetic energy. If it impacted your chest you would feel it. But apologies, my mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's you. So where's the kinetic energy now? Can you feel it coursing through your veins? No. Because what’s really there is mass, and relative motion.

You can also feel heat. Touch that pretty stove and sizz, you feel heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion.

Taste is chemical in nature, and primitive. Most of your sense of taste is really your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a guy called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, not shape, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.

The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But it never occurred to you because you’re accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how you experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, ontological things that are there. And nowhere is this more so than with time.

So, what is time? Let’s start by looking up the definition of a second:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0K…

So, a second is nine billion periods of radiation. Now, what’s a period? We know that radiation is basically light, so let’s have a look at frequency:

Frequency = 1 / T and Frequency = v / λ

So frequency is the reciprocal of the period T, and also velocity v divided by wavelength λ. No problem. Flipping things around, we see that period T is wavelength λ divided by velocity v. We know that a wavelength is a distance, a thing like a metre:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second...

And we all know that velocity is a distance divided by a time. So a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. The result is another period of time. This definition of time is circular and tells us nothing. How do we define it? Let’s look at frequency again:

Frequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit of time.

So frequency is a number of events per second. And a second is a number of some other events. The interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. For time is a measure of events, of change, measured by and against some other change. And for things to change, something, somewhere, somehow, has to have motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time.

We measured nine billion oscillation events and defined that as a second. We counted events. We counted motions. One, two, three, four, five… nine billion. Mark that down as a second. But you don’t have to count the motion in an atomic clock. You could count beans in a bucket. Ping, ping, ping, chuck them in, regular as clockwork.

You’re sitting there counting beans into the bucket, ping, ping, ping. Now, what is the direction of time? The only direction that is actually there, is the direction of the beans you’re throwing. “Fuller Bucket” is not the direction of time. “More Beans" is not the direction of time. The direction of your time is the direction of your counting, and I could have asked you to count them out of the bucket. There is no “Arrow of Beans”. There is no “Arrow of Time”. That’s just an illusion, as imaginary as the direction you take when you count along the set of integers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 →

So why do we say things like Clocks slow down as if a clock is something that moves like a car? It isn't travelling. There's no slow or fast or up or down to it. We say the day went quickly but we know it didn’t go anywhere, and it didn’t go quickly at any speed at all. It isn’t travelling and there is no direction. The only directions that are there, are the directions of the motions that make the events that we use to measure the intervals between the other events. And they’re being counted, incremented, added up. We count regular atomic motion to use as a ratio against some other motion, be it of light, atoms, clocks, or brains. All of these things have motion, both internal motion and travelling motion. And all those motions are real, with real directions in space, ending in the sameness we call entropy. But the time direction isn't real. It's as imaginary as a trip to nine billion.

That's why the past is only in your head and your records. It isn’t a place you can travel to. It’s the places where things moved from. All those places are still here, now. And while the past is the integral of all nows, now lasts for no time at all. Because time needs events, and if there were only intervals and no events, there wouldn’t be any time. When you take away the events and the motion, you take away the time. A second isn’t some slice of spacetime, it’s just nine billion motions of a caesium atom. Accelerate to half the speed of light and a second is still nine billion motions of a caesium atom. But there's only half the local motion there used to be, because the other half is already doing the travelling motion through space. Imagine yourself as a metronome. Each tick is a thought in your head, a beat in your heart, a second of your time. If you’re motionless with respect to me I see you ticking like this |||. If you jet off in a spaceship, you tick like this /\/\/\. If you could reach c and we know you can’t, you wouldn’t tick at all. Your time would flatline like this ______ because any transverse motion would cause c to be exceeded. And you wouldn’t tick for anybody else in the universe. That’s the thing that’s out there, the thing we’re trying to learn about. This is what it’s like:

What can you see? What can you measure? Yes you can measure height. And width. And if it wasn't just a picture you could also measure depth. That's three Dimensions, with a capital D because we have freedom of movement in those dimensions. What else can you see? What else can you measure? You can see things moving, but you can’t see a fourth dimension. You might imagine a time dimension, with direction and length. But the picture comes from the wikipedia temperature page. The thing you should measure is temperature, which used to be considered a dimension, before the word changed from “measure” to “Dimension” under your feet. Temperature is an aspect of heat, that derived effect of motion. When you measure the temperature you are measuring motion, because that’s what’s there. You can call it a dimension, but there can be no motion in this dimension, because it’s a measure of motion. If you were one of those dots, immersed in temperature like we are immersed in time, you would not talk of climbing to a “high temperature”, because there is no height. Likewise we cannot travel a length of time, because there is no length, just as there is no height in temperature. So time is a dimension with a small d. It's a measure of change of place rather than a measure of place, and it has no absolute units, because you can only measure one change of place against another. The units are relative, which is what Special Relativity tells us.

Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your relative velocity and space contracts while time dilates by a factor of √(1-v2/c2). If you travel at .99c, space contracts to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The space in the universe didn’t contract because you travelled through it. But your time did.

Einstein didn’t understand the full meaning of Special Relativity until later in life. In the early days he was influenced by Hermann Minkowski, a father-figure whose forename was the same as Einstein’s actual father. It was Minkowski who turned time into the fourth dimension:

The mathematics of his revolutionary paper on Special Relativity was relatively elementary, and at first he resisted its reformulation in terms of four-dimensional space-time by his former teacher Hermann Minkowski, complaining that “since the mathematicians pounced on relativity theory I no longer understand it myself”.

Later Einstein struggled with the Twins Paradox in 1918. He used acceleration from General Relativity as the explanation, but this explanation was erroneous and didn’t account for passing clocks. Look it up on wikipedia. A couple of years on in 1920 he gave an address at the University of Leyden about the dreaded ether:

..according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable inedia, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

When you read the history you can see a slow evolution from the postulate that says the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference. The problem with reference frames is that all our observer velocities are zero, and if you don’t take care the sun goes round the earth. They don’t explain why the speed of light is always the same. It wasn’t until Einstein met Godel in Princeton that he realised the full impact of what Special Relativity really meant:

In his response to Godel's paper in the Schilpp volume, Einstein acknowledged that "the problem here disturbed me at the time of the building up of the general theory of relativity." This problem he described as follows: "Is what remains of temporal connection between world-points in the theory of relativity an asymmetrical relation (like time, intuitively understood, and unlike space), or would one be just as much justified to assert A is before B as to assert that A is after B? The issue could also be put this way: is relativistic space-time in essence a space or a time."

Godel didn’t “find a way to time travel” with his rotating universe. He merely used this conjecture to demonstrate that time could not have passed if you could visit the past. Einstein was with Godel on this, and understood full well the implications:

It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away...

That’s the true meaning of Special Relativity. The “speed of light” was always the problem. And it was always the problem because time was always the problem. Because at the speed of light there’s no time left for anything else to happen. It’s why c isn’t really a speed, because you run out of time trying to get there, and if there’s no time, there’s no speed because speed is distance over time. Velocity is prime. It defines your metres and your seconds. We should talk of it as a fraction of c like in the equations, or by degrees, but not by the things it itself defines. Because like temperature time is derived from motion, which is what is there. And c is the total motion, the rapidity of inductance from which we slice our immersive time, the inescapable property of oscillating photons and those electromagnetic things from which we’re made. From which the universe is made.

The universe is not a block universe, it is a world in motion. The worldlines are only in mathematical space, and in your head. There is no future, there is no past, only the now that is always now, the now of Presentism. We don’t travel in time at one second per second. We don't travel in time at all. Relativistic clocks don’t travel in time at different rates, they travel in space at different degrees of c, and when they collide, they collide at the same location and at the same time whatever their faces say is local time. Local time.

To travel backwards in time we'd need to unevent events, we’d need negative motion. But motion is motion whichever way it goes. You can’t have negative motion. So you can’t travel backwards in time. There are no time travel paradoxes, because there is no time travel, and there is no time travel because there is no travelling in time. And there never was. Time didn’t start fifteen billion years ago. Because time didn’t start in the first place. It was motion that started in the first place. And it was fifteen billion light years away by every light path you can track through timeless space. That’s how far we’ve come.

And now we can move on.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to echalk and R Beau Lotto re colour perception, to Palle Yourgrau for “A World Without Time” re Einstein history, and to Julian Barbour (“The End of Time), Paul Davies (“About Time”) and Carlo Rovelli (various) for background reading. And thanks to all the forum fellas for all the feedback, wiki contributors, anybody who put up an image I’ve borrowed, and anybody else I’ve missed. And Albert Einstein

Thanks guys.

The twins paradox isn't as you describe Edtharan. You should remove the doppler effect, and then on both legs of the trip each twin considers the other twin's time to be running slower. It's | and /\/\/\ from both viewpoints.

Here's an excerpt from a later version of TIME EXPLAINED.

Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your velocity and the space contracts and the time dilates by a factor of √(1-v2/c2). If you travel at .99c, space contracts to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The space in the universe didn’t contract forever because you travelled through it. But your time did.

I'm sorry I was rude. But I really think we should agree to differ on this.

jck: my view is that energy is like tension. You need something to have tension. So I'll say matter is made out of space and is built via work that costs energy. Like a house is made out of bricks, built via work that costs money.

Duration of movement is either the same or different, if different then it is the duration that is different. While the concept of time can appear different during the same duration the duration cannot be different as the duration is absolute.

As far as the twins paradox is concerned the only way the twin in space would be younger is if the cells in the body aged more slowly and all the evidence points to space travel having an adverse affect on human cells.

No kidding, if you did move fast you really would experience less time. See time dilation on wikipedia.

It is funny that people are more than happy to accept the views of multi observers when it agrees with what they think but are not happy at all to accept the views of anyone who does not agree with what they think. Even when everyone agrees it is hardly cause for celebration given the record for complete agreement over the decades is it?

Edtharan:

Why is a dimension that we have no freedom of movement in "not the same"

It's not the same because it's different. It's different because you can move in one and not the other. Because one is a measure of the movement you can do in the other. You say you can't see what's wrong with:

Local time. At the same location.

Look at the words. You're got local and location. You're talking about two different local times at the same local place. Your blindness to this is a reflection of the doggedness of your "time is a length" axiom.

The point of collision does not have it's own "Time" unless there is an observer there

This is saying time is subjective, which is agreeing with me. But still you insist that time is some physical dimension.

This makes absolutely no sense. What are you talking about?

It makes perfect sense if you try to understand it. But you don't. And instead you dismiss it as nonsense. Not good.

Now I see, you haven't actually looked at why the Twins paradox actually occurs have you. The twins paradox only occurs if one of the observers accelerates...

LOL. The twins paradox is not caused by acceleration. Go and look it up properly. Einstein used this in a GR explanation in 1918, and he got it wrong too, as demonstrated by passing clocks. When you've looked it up you can apologise, and take back all your "you never explain" and other accusations.

No, in fact don't bother Edtharan. You're like some junior religious acolyte clinging to a flat earth faith. You don't understand, you don't try to understand, and instead you pretend that I don't explain. You throw in straw man arguments, you say I said things I didn't, you say you've proved something you haven't or I've ignored something I didn't, and you trumpet imagined victories. My patience is at an end. I'm not wasting any more time on you. Remember this for when you're older and wiser.

It's good to talk jck. I'll be writing MASS EXPLAINED next, which you should find interesting. Can I say your definitions are axioms. They are postulates, assumptions, things you take for granted, and they act as blockers. To demonstrate this, I'd like to ask you a question. Read MONEY EXPLAINED and you will see some parallels between money and energy. Now answer me this:

Can you build a house out of money?

Although whether or not I define time makes no difference to this discussion. What is important is that if you are going to argue against a definition of time, you should argue against a definition of time.

It makes every difference. You're arguing to defend something you can't define. Yet rejecting my explanation.

Why does motion through space necessitate time not being a dimension? Why can't you have motion through space and yet still have time as a dimension? Why does lack of freedom of movement through time mean it can't be a dimension?

Time is a dimension in that it is a measure, of events and motion using other events and motion. You confuse this type of dimension with the type of dimension that offers freedom of movement. The two are not the same. You can measure anything. That doesn't make it the sort of dimension you insist that time is.

You make these statement, but you never explore the negative, you never disprove the opposite of your claims and never provide a reason why your claim must be true and other claims can not. Just stating and restating your initial claims does not make them any more true or provide any explanation or show your reasoning.

I've explained myelf umpteen times and have demonstrated great patience. To say I never do this or that and don't show my reasoning, is dishonest.

This is the last time I am going to ask for these answers. If you can not provide these then the only conclusions I can make about your reasoning is that you came up with this by guessing or picking something that sounded good without any thought what so ever. If you did arrive at your conclusions through rational though, then please provide how you did this.

What questions?

Local time. At the same location. From their frame of reference. Ed, this sums up everything that's wrong with your wrong concept of time. And you just won't look at it. How can one actual objective definitive collision location in "spacetime" possibly have two different times? Now you think carefully about this and your time-travelling clocks.

I don't understand this paragraph. First you have previously stated that the local times on the clocks can be different, but then you say that they can't be different. Am I missing something here?

You bet you are. What does local mean? It means local to a place. There can only be one local time in a place, not two. That's why the colliding clocks is so important.

The only way I can seem to make sense of what you are saying is that if a 3rd observer is present that give the two clocks a fixed reference point in which to compare their relative space-time positions with.

No. They collide. At the same place. At the same time, regardless of whatever their faces say.

What if there is no 3rd observer? What then dictates the "Now" that is absolute? What if you also have a 4th observer but is in a different frame of reference than the 3rd? What if the 3rd observer changes their frame of reference by accelerating? What then can be used as the reference to an absolute Now?

The light path length.

Relativity states that in all frames of reference Light will be measured to have the same velocity. Therefore an observer travelling with the light+mirror arrangement will see light travelling at C. An observer that this clock moves past will also observe the light bouncing between the mirrors at the velocity of C. Yet, the observer travelling with the clock will see the light take a longer route. This means that that moving observer will count less bounces than the stationary observer. But these are the same object. Not a different one. How can two observers observing the same object and see it behave in two contradictory ways at the same time? Using what is presented in your essay could you explain this.

At the same time is your problem. The observers experience time differently. The observer with the light+mirror sees the light like this |. Remember you don't know if it's him moving. Let's say there are six beats here, which I can spread out to show them like this |||||. The other guy sees the light like this /\/\/. He sees only five beats because his time experience is dilated, but the path length is the same as far as he's concerned. Look up the twins paradox on wikipedia.

But, Farsight, that is not the actual definition of time. So way on earth are you calling it a definition of time. It is not a definition of time.

You define time, Ed.

Again, you have failed to explain what your proposal about time means it is not like space.

Groan. Motion is through space. That's what it is. Time is a measure of that motion compared to other motion. You have freedom of movement through space. You don't have freedom of movement through time because time is a measure of motion through space. That's why time isn't like space.

Yes, but what if the clocks were to pass through that same location in space, but at 13:49pm local time...

Local time. At the same location. From their frame of reference. Ed, this sums up everything that's wrong with your wrong concept of time. And you just won't look at it. How can one actual objective definitive collision location in "spacetime" possibly have two different times? Now you think carefully about this and your time-travelling clocks.

This is the heart of it. For the clock travelling at speed to have ticked less, means it has experienced the same amount of time as the stationery one, but the mechanical means of measuring the passage of time was compromised by the motion of the clock.

No Robonewt. I mean the clock that ticked less experienced less time. We could be talking about a light clock, where the motion means the internal light path between parallel mirrors is like this /\/\/\/\/\ rather than this ||||| so the light has further to go.

This is where special relativity fails to differentiate between illusion and reality.

No, there's no illusion. I'm an advocate of Special Relativity. I think we just misunderstand it. It tells us time is subjective, but people insist that time is objective.

You are saying both clocks have experienced the same amount of time, but the faster is inaccurate due to the effects of its velocity on its mechanics. Its not a real time difference just an illusion.

I'm not saying that, see above. The two clocks have experienced different amounts of time. But neither travelled through time. They set off, they travelled through space, they came back, and they collided. All the clock faces ever did was count the number of times the light bounced back and forth. You'll find the same sort of thing in the wikipedia article on time dilation.

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

The current interpretation of Special Relativity says that because the faster clock shows a slower time it has travelled slower through time, it’s not an illusion it’s a real time difference. So your theory is only possible if Special Relativity is wrong.

Here's that language problem again. The faster clock hasn't travelled slower through time. That's where the illusion lies. It travelled faster through space and therefore experienced less time. There is no travelling through time. My theory is only possible if your interpretation of Special Relativity is wrong.

Farsight is creating this circular argument to disprove Time as we know it, but it is a false circular argument as the method the Farsight uses as the definition of time is not a definition of time at all.

 

The whole essay is a big strawman as the definition that is being argued against is not what is used as the definition of time. It is in fact a ratio between Distance and Time that defines the Speed of Light.

Oh geddoutofit. I'm not creating a circular argument. I'm challenging it. And I resent the way you stoop to this "false" and "strawman" dishonesty because you can't respond adequately to time is not a length.

If time was like a river you could go up it, down it or travel along it at different rates. I was trying to say that time passes at the same rate whether motion happens or not.

I think language causes big problems when it comes to time. OK the river is a figure of speech, I think we both agree on that. But I'm also saying "time passes" is another figure of speech. Think about how this implies travelling and motion through time, and see if you can really justify it.

If no one existed to count anything would time no longer exist? Just because something is not recorded does not mean it doesn’t happen.

Time would still exist just like heat would still exist. Both are derived effects of motion. Things move. Things happen, whether anybody's there to see it or not. Whoo, don't put me down as one of these tree-in-the-woods guys.

With regards to the traveling through temperature, yes it is a figure of speech, but what I was trying to say is that heat has a direction; you can get hotter or cooler along the heat scale. Ok it’s a measure of the amount of radiation, but you do travel through all the amounts in between, you can’t just jump from one temperature to another. How else would you describe it other than a motion.

Heat hasn't got a direction. Really. If we think about an ideal monotomic gas, the atoms are moving in all directions. You measure the average velocity and put it down on a linear scale, then think about moving along]/i] this scale, but it's totally imaginary. The only thing that's moving are the atoms. I'd rephrase travelling from one temperature to another as changing from one temperature to another.

I was trying to show that time doesn’t relate to heat in the same way. You can only go along with time and you can only travel at a certain rate, whereas you can change your temperature up and down at varying rates... Heat can be touched, experienced and changed. Distance can be seen, experienced and changed. Time can be experienced, but not touched and not changed.

Fair enough, heat and time aren't the same. Maybe the big difference is that time is immersive. The atoms "immersed" in the ideal gas can't experience or touch heat like we can. They just move faster. Maybe if they had little atomic brains they'd be thinking their time was running faster. I'm not sure, but they wouldn't be talking about heat travel. Or time travel. Just travel.

Light isn’t a constant, the speed of light is a constant.

OK, typo.

That is for a second as measured by an atomic clock, light will cover a measured distance. It is travelling at a fixed constant speed from A to B. The only way special relativity works is for light to experience a different rate of time. That is, if light were carrying an atomic clock then it would not witness any change in the clock as so would experience no time, as it experiences no time it cannot lose energy and so can travel across a vacuum. For us as observers though we witness a number of ticks in our atomic clock and so for us an amount of time has passed. This would seem to suggest that the rate of time you experience is dependant on the speed you are travelling.

Agreed.

Multiple rates of time mean time travel.

Naaaaw. I talked about this with Edtharan. You can contrive two clocks travelling at different velocities so that they collide. At the moment of impact one reads 13:49pm and the other reads 14:49pm, because one has experienced one hour less time than the other. But there's no time travel. They didn't miss each other by an hour. One clock didn't visit the other's past. One merely had more forward motion and so less lateral internal motion, and so ticked less.

If C is just a constant number then it has no relevance to anything and is just a figure that is used to give results a magnitude.

I see it as something like temperature. There's no real units to it, it's just a scale set by a couple of easily-measured marker points divided up into chunks.

Your whole argument fails if we choose to no longer define the metre using light. The circular definition disappears and the speed of light, whilst always the same, is a magnitude is dependant on the length we define as a metre. It is not an absolute constant, just constant relative to our definition of the metre.

I think my argument is in essence Special Relativity is telling us more than we think. So IMHO if my argument fails, Special Relativity fails. No kidding! Sorry this has been another long one.

Sorry for interrupting the discussion, but I want to sneak in a short question to Farsight... How many dimensions, in your opinion, are contained inside, (or a property of), the Universe ?

That's a tough one. To simplify it let's exclude any dimension that is merely some kind of measure, like temperature or mass, with no degree of freedom that you can move in. You know I include time in that category, so that leaves us with three Dimensions of space.

However when you look at the forces like gravity you can liken them to the "flatlander" experience, where you travel over a rumple without noticing the third Dimension. But you do notice a mysterious action-at-distance force that makes the uphill portion hard work. I have a concept that says forces are not the result of messenger particles, but are instead somehow geometric in nature. So I'd say we need to add in a Dimension for gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force. The weak force is maybe different, so I won't include it. Ergo my answer is six. At least. Maybe. And not necessarily.

Robonewt, this has turned out to be a long one, but in reply to your earlier post:

Re the colour perception, I wanted to start with a surprise to make the reader sit up and notice, and lead in with a few paragraphs pointing out that just about all of our sensory experiences are related to motion. I didn't try to prove colour perception because I rather thought everybody would already understand that colour was our perception of wavelength. Heat is definitely something different to colour, we experience it rather than perceive it, and it burns us. But we do understand the mechanics, and the mechanics are those of motion. Pressure at least for a gas, is explained kinetically, which is motion again. Re kinetic energy, see ENERGY EXPLAINED for more info - nobody "has" kinetic energy, they have mass and.. motion. I didn't actually say sound does not really exist. I just wanted to hammer home the motion.

Now to get down to your mathematics regarding time. The problem you are having is down to a problem that physics has with maths, in that they often use a definition to define a measure that itself was defined by the original definition. The meter is now defined as the distance light travels in a period of time, but the speed of light was defined as a distance over time where the distance was measured in meters. This is a wonderful circular definition...

Agreed.

All dimensions are terms that have been created by the human race in order to try and make sense of the universe by breaking it into manageable bits. This is true for length width height and time. The same could be said of pressure, temperature and other dimension.

No problem.

If you travel from zero degrees to 50 degrees over 2 seconds, you have still gone through a motion, just one of temperature.

Sorry, no. You haven't travelled from zero degrees to 50 degrees. You haven't gone through any motion. The temperatures are merely two different measures of motion. You can't actually travel between the two.

I do partly agree with you in that time is different from other dimensions, because like you, I don’t think time can be travelled along like a river.

OK.

Time will pass if there is movement or not, If nothing happens, you don’t move from a to b, your pressure, temperature and bank account stay at zero for three days, three days will still have passed. Even if your atomic clock has stopped time will still pass at the same rate.

You said you can't travel along it like a river, but now it's passing? I'll assume that's a slip of the tongue and pass on it. What's more important is that if everything in the Universe including atoms, light, clocks, your brain, and the earth has no motion, there really can't be any time.

With regards to your beans analogy, it does have a direction, one of volume, more beans = more volume.

Sorry, it isn't a direction. You can't point to the "more beans" direction and take a step towards it. You can never travel in the "more beans" direction. The only direction is a mathematical one, a counting direction, and it's notional, imaginary, a linguistic sleight. It simply isn't real.

As I said, I believe time is different to all other dimensions. Time existed before the beginning of the universe and will exist after, after all nothing still needs time to take place in.

OK, it's different, but if it's a measure and there's nothing to measure, how can you say that it exists? And surely the conventional view is that time began with the Universe?

We can travel a length of temperature, if you are at 10 degrees for 2 seconds you travel at ten degrees for two seconds, if you go from 5 degrees to 10 in 2 seconds you have accelerated at 2.5 degrees per second.

See above. There is no real length/motion/acceleration through temperature. It's just a figure of speech.

We travel in time, we travel for a length of seconds, but we can only travel at a fixed rate and we can’t travel for a negative value of seconds.

Obviously what I'm saying is that people are too used to thinking in terms of length when they think about time. I'm saying there is no real "length" to time, and no travelling through it because all said and done it's just a measure of motion.

If anything time is the only scalar dimension. All other dimensions are vectors. Time has only one direction all others have 2.

I know what you mean, but do check your actual words above.

If you take time out of all equations nothing could happen because there is no time for it to happen in, if you want to say that time is a human invention and doesn’t exist, then you have to use the same argument to say the other dimensions don’t exist after all every dimension is just a term we use to describe the state of an object therefore you don’t have any equations. Yahoo no science…….

No, I didn't say that. Events happen, and we measure the interval between events using other events, and we call this interval time. We all experience time, just as we all experience heat. It's not some figment of our imagination. But the events dictate time, they make the experience. They aren't in time, just as they are not in change. There is no change dimension that we can travel through. And we can't travel through time either.

Don't ask for it to be split off, swansont. The definition of c is at the heart of this whole thread. Yes, it's constant, but defining it as the "speed of light" is circular and has to be wrong. Your velocity as a fraction of c defines the very distance and time you use to calculate the speed that you then define c to be.

edit: If I misinterpreted you and you don't define c to be the speed of light, what do you define it to be?

Robonewt: thanks for going through the essay and for your input. I'd like to respond properly but I'm at work at the moment, so I'll have to get back to you later. For now, I'd say I'm not trying to banish time from the science books. Time travel yes. But not time. Time exists, like heat exists. Both are derived from motion, and neither have any real direction.