Re: The existance of time as anything other than a mere "concept"
- From: "Dirk Van de moortel" <dirkvandemoortel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 18:48:11 GMT
"John2005" <johnjmechanical@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1129603499.291174.168960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hello everyone,
>
> I would like to start a discussion with the forum members related to
> the concept of time, and it's existance as anything other than a mere
> concept.
>
> I believe that time is merely a "concept" that we use as a tool, to
> compare the occurrence of events. For example, the earth orbits the
> sun, and we call this one year, the earth makes one revolution on it's
> axis and we call this a day. A machine called a clock causes an arm to
> rotate 360 degrees at a certain constant rate, and we call this a
> minute or an hour.
>
> With time, it seems all we are doing is taking the passage of one
> event, (i.e., Earth orbit, clock-arm rotation, the rate at which a
> Cesium atom cycles or absorbs and releases energy, etc.) and then
> comparing it to another event, (i.e., the length of a workday, the
> speed of your car, how long it takes to cook your dinner etc.. We are
> just using the "concept" of time as a tool. We use the passage of one
> event as a reference point, and compare other events to it.
>
> In my mind, when people talk about "time travel" there is really
> nothing to travel back into, or to travel forward into, since time is
> only a concept. Likewise, when people talk about an object like a
> planet warping "space-time", again, I don't see how time, i.e.,
> something that exists only as a concept, can be "warped" or manipulated
> in a physical way.
>
> In physics, is time considered a physical entity that is moving, and/or
> something that can be moved through ? Is time travel considered
> possible, and is time considered to be a dimension and/or physical
> entity ?
>
> Has anyone ever proven that time is anything other than a concept? Has
> it been proven that time is indeed a "dimension" or even something that
> has some form of energy?
>
> I do not think it is even possible to "prove" that time exists as
> anything other than a concept within our minds.
>
> Time appears to be nothing more than that which separates events, based
> on our own time reference measures.
>
> I would appreciate other viewpoints and feedback on this topic.
Physicists define time as what they read on clocks.
As soon as you have a clock, you can start doing physics.
- and if you have a "bad" clock, you do "bad" physics.
If your clock says 7 when you hit it, then the hit-event
is given "the time 7".
I have my clock and you have yours. So I have my
time and you have yours. If our clocks turn out to be
similar (which we can find out by doing some simple
experiments), we can even develop relativity.
After all, that is what "we" have been doing during the
last thousands of years, right?
As you have seen from some of the replies, the definition
of time as what we read on clocks, is much too simple
for some people. Perhaps bad popular science should be
blamed (or, if it keeps them off the streets, blessed) for
that :-)
Dirk Vdm
.
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