Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Present awareness]

You are absolutely right Steve3007! The “now” is indivisible, not even a fraction of a second away. The light from the Sun is shinning “now” in an unbroken stream and depending on your location in space, the light you see may have left the Sun’s surface minutes ago or light years ago. The point I’m trying to make is that it is “now” everywhere in the universe, always has been and always will be. It may be noon on one side of the Earth and in the middle of the night on the other side, but it is still “now” no matter where you are.

If I’m walking toward a stop sign, I’m not there yet, but will be there in the future. For me, my position at the stop sign exist in the future, but I can see it “now”. The truth is, I’m not walking from the past to the present to the future, even though I may say that, there I was, here I am and I’ll be at the stop sign soon. I am walking in the “now” and since everything else in the universe is also in the “now”, I never leave the present moment.

[Fdesilva]

Yes, it all seems obvious to me Steve 3007 but fdesilva was asking: “ The universe that is going to be in a say a billionth of a second from now. Does it exist now?” I believe that it does and was trying to point out why I think that way.

OK, that's interesting because to me that sounds like saying you believe 2 + 2 = 5. According to my understanding of the English language, the word "now" means "zero seconds away" and "a billionth of a second from now" means "a billionth of a second away", so, to me, it would be a simple self-contradiction to say that the universe at some future time is the universe now. A bit like saying the place 2 feet to my right is the place 2 feet to my left. Or like saying Edinburgh is London. Or like saying 9pm is 10pm. Stuff like that.

No what I am asking is when you are in London do you believe Edinburg exist. Is it proper English to ask such a question? If it is how would you ask an equivalent question in regards to time?

[Steve3007]

No what I am asking is when you are in London do you believe Edinburg exist. Is it proper English to ask such a question? If it is how would you ask an equivalent question in regards to time?

Sorry for the extravagantly late reply.

Yes, when I am in London I believe that Edinburgh exists. Yes, I think it is proper English to ask that question. That question is equivalent to: Are there two points in space (London and Edinburgh) that correspond to a single point in time? So the corresponding question for time would be: Are there two points in time that correspond to a single point in space? I'd say yes, there are.

[Raymond]

There is the clock time and entropic time. I understand both. The clock time truly existed before inflation. The state of the universe back then constituted a perfect clock. A perfect periodic state, which has no temporal direction yet. You can't tell if a perfect pendulum (or Aristotle's eternal circular motion) goes forward or backwards in time. It just fluctuates. Then, when the conditions on the 4D substrate were right, the closed 3D Planck volume, containing virtual particles only (represented by Feynman diagrams of closed propagators, circles with an arrow, so the virtualcparticle rotates in space and time), "bangs" into real existence and the perfect clock is gone, replaced by the irreversible process of entropic time. These processes can be quantified by introducing a clock, which can never be realized, as there are no perfectly periodic reversible processes. Only in the mind, and before inflation (caused by the negative curvature of the 4D substrate from which two 3D universes came into being) they exist. Non-inversible processes don't evolve in time, but constitute time. The notion of a time axis on which one can move is a chimaera. What is done (by Einstein) is to put an ideal, imaginary reversible clock (a constant periodic motion not found anywhere, except in the mind) besides of these irreversible processes (constituting entropic time), objectify it by constructing a time axis, and then retroactively state that processes move in it.


Aristotle, Aristotle
Left without you
Would be lurking the bottle
Could no more make do

Would be rigid-stuck
In Einstein's ****
On his objective clock
That bugger parse

Aristotle Aristotle
You embottle
modern rebottle
Full throttle

Aristo my man
Far you are in space and time
Still I know I can
Not go on without you

[SteveKlinko]

I thought I had posted this yesterday, but it hasn't appeared yet. This reason explains things if this OP appears twice.

According to relativity, time within one reference frame is from the time in another reference frame. For example, a “minute” for A, who is moving, is longer than a “minute” for B, who is stationary. The conclusion is that there is no absolute and correct length of time for a minute. Some minutes take longer than other minutes, and none of them is the “right” one.

The speed of light is constant. Speed is distance over time. So, if the speed of light is constant, and one element of that speed is time, then a minute is always the same for every beam of light. That is, there is an absolute or a correct time.

We have a built in preconception of what Time is. We instinctively believe that there is some separate Phenomenon in Physics that we call Time. We believe that this Time Phenomenon is continuously running and always has been running in the background of everything that happens in the Universe. But this is a mistaken Belief and has been disproved by modern theories of Physics and especially by Special Relativity and by Quantum Field Theory. These theories have shown that Time is nothing more than Relative relationships between Objects and Processes. There is no Absolute Time. The Time that we use is not Absolute Time, but rather it is always relative to some Reference Physical Process. References are things like the Number of rotations of the hand on a mechanical Stop Watch, the Number of Rotations of the Earth on its axis, or the Number of Oscillations of a Cesium Atomic Clock. Each of these References will have their own accuracy specifications with the Cesium Atomic Clock being the most accurate. There are new Optical Clocks coming on line that are supposedly more Accurate than the Cesium Atomic Clock, but I will stick with the decades "Tried and True" Cesium Atomic Clock for this discussion. Logically, Science has used the Cesium Atomic Clock as the Reference for all other References. But the Cesium Clock is just a Physical Process, so we have all the other References being Relative Processes to the Cesium Atomic Clock Process.

The upshot of all this is that Science does not use or know how to measure any kind of Absolute Time Phenomenon. It is always the Relative behavior of Physical Processes. This is the key to understanding that there is actually no such thing as an Absolute Time in Science or in the Universe. Science has discovered that Time as we think of it does not Exist. The Relative Time between Physical Processes is completely Local to the Physical Processes themselves. So we can say that before the Big Bang when there was supposedly no Matter, no Energy, and no Space, that there could not be any kind of Relative Time that was even Possible. Therefore, there was no Infinite Past, no Million Year Past, and not even a One Second Past, before the Big Bang. We actually should not even call the Relationship between Physical Processes, Relative Time. It is just a Relationship of the relative Numbers that are counted by the References. We can take the next step in this analysis and say there is no such thing as Time without specifying Absolute or Relative. A disappointing thing about the Non Existence of Time is that there is no possibility of Time Travel because there is nothing to go Back in and nothing to go Forward in.

Now let's consider Time from a Special Relativity point of view. First of all, Time is Not the Fourth Dimension of Space in spite of what the Science Snake Oil book writers say. Time plus the three dimensions of space form a mathematical four dimensional Manifold. Time is always given the index 0, and the three indexes of Space are given as 1, 2, and 3. If Time was considered to be the Fourth Dimension it would have been given an Index of 4 when they first formulated the equations. Time is simply a parameter that describes a particular behavior of Physical Matter. One of the most important results of Special Relativity is that Time slows down in a moving Frame. Even Cesium Atomic Clocks slow down. So a Cesium Clock on board the Space Station will run slower than a Cesium Atomic Clock on the ground. The knee jerk reaction to this is to say Time has slowed down. But all we know is that the Cesium Atomic Clock on the Station will register a smaller Number of Oscillations than the same Atomic Clock on the ground. But this only means that the Cesium Atomic Oscillations are slowed and it says nothing about what some Time concept is actually doing. It is the Relationship between the Number of Oscillations on the Station with the Number of Oscillations on the ground that is important. It is results like this that forced Scientists to realize that there is no Absolute Time Clock driving the Universe. If there was, then it would be impossible for Time to slow down on the Station and not on the ground. They realized that Time was not an independently Real Phenomenon that exists in the Universe. Time is always the result of Relationships between different Physical Processes. Without Physical Processes, Time does not even make any sense.