Time May Not Exist

[wa1ex]

Source:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

Ferenc Krausz is a Scientist that has cloaked the shortest time intervals ever recorded.
The Shortest time ever recorded is 100 attoseconds, (One attosecond is to one second what one second is to the age of the universe.). :O (this took place in 2004)
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3486160.stm

To give some perspective:
1 Attosecond is 10-18
Planck time is 10-44 (the shortest physically meaningful interval of time)

What is Planck time?
The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the ‘quantum of length’, the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.

It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? who knows .....At least for now.




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External Source:
time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”
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Does time exist?
If so which way does it go?

/ttiforum/images/graemlins/confused.gif

 

[ruthless]

would it be correct to akin plank time to an atom?

 

[MEM]

That's right. Time is an artifact of the mechanics of our perception of reality. It's like saying a reel of film has time. When in fact there are events captured as images, some events happen in one direction of a reference image and some events happen in the other direction. There is no "now," only individual events captured as a sequence of images. One can travel from one image to another image out of sequence, but not using a film projector. A film projector requires one to view the individual images in a specific sequence. But one can unroll the film, look at one image, then move to another section of the film and look at another image. To someone who only knows the film by way of a film projector, you could say that person is "film traveling."

 

[bogz]

A lot of people say that film has time. The distance between the center of each frame represents 1/24th of a second.

Speed up the film when you record, and time appears to pass more slowly for what you are observing.

Slow down the film and time appears to pass more quickly.


And I don't think time is an artifact. Time dialation is very real, so I assume that time is very real as well. As real as gravity.

 

[Packerbacker]

Comparing time to a movie is using a perspective credited to the French writer Henri Bergson.

There is an interesting anecdote associated with this. Bertrand Russell, the English mathematician, said he attended his very first motion picture to investigate Bergson's theory of time! Now there is a real intellectual--he only goes to the movies to examine physical theories.

Otherwise, I agree with your assessment, and refer to what we know as clock time as "Bergsonian Time."

To Bogz: I hope I'm not boring everyone to death by continually stating that the word time is used in multiple ways. For example, the stills of the motion picture are content which exist independently of the projection of the film which is the motion of time. The motion of time is one of the fundamental constants of physics, of course.

 

[MEM]

Wow, an intelligent response to a post. Thank you for that. I haven't posted here in a while because I only got dunder-headed responses from a poster here at tti. Let's see if I can remember that chowder-head's name,....... Rainman.

Here's another quote on time:

There is no difference between the past and the future in the 4-dimensional space-time-world. The present is only an illusion.

 

[Packerbacker]

In principle I agree with that. But the implications are that everything , our lives, would be predestined.Maybe that's true and we are just taking a course in humanity 101 (given the state of the world, maybe a grade school course, though.)

I prefer to think of the past and future as a field of probabilites, and what we know as 'now' a wave crest rippling through that 4-d field. The crest of the wave is "now" which is likely to repeat quite closely the wave before it unless the probability is changed. Each wave crest creates its own universe: these are the alternate time lines.

 

[MEM]

One theory holds:

Predestined in that all outcomes occur, i.e. the wavefunction collapse reality we observe is only one of an infinite outcomes that are actualized. What's not predestined is the reality we observe.

So if one outcome leads to death, and one outcome leads to ......, does the path our consciousness takes random, or the path that does not lead to death?

 

[wa1ex]

One thing that taught me to look at time from another perspective is watching movies that are not in chronological order.

Pulp Fiction ring any bells?

Same story can be told form different time references with pretty much the same outcome.

so time=0 takes on a new meaning other than the big bang...depending on who describes the events...bringing up the question once again...does time exist?

 

[Packerbacker]

Does time exist? In certain senses, no.

I don't think there is a common dimension of time. I started to discuss this in a different thread recently, but dropped it. I think that you can't talk about time without talking about materiality, specifically the smallest units of materiality. I would say that each of them has it's own time, so there are a countless number of different time paths which are roughly parallel, which makes it seem as if there is a common dimension.

But one cannot separate the observer, or perceiver from the perceived. I think we only perceive changes within ourself. These may be prompted by outside events, but what I see is not the image I think I see, it is really electrical signals produced by my own body. Conception is creation.

Perhaps we do have an intuition about probable paths of the future. It would seem that a survival path ought to have a different psychic quale that a death trip.I would assign a different time dimension to every consciousness.

To change the subject a little.

Twice in my life I have had an unusual experience with time.The first instance was as a farm boy riding a horse that bolted. The second instance involved an accident of the San Bernardino Freeway near downtown L.A. in which my car was totalled. About 10 seconds before impact it is as if a small switch was flipped in my brain, and the outside world seemed to slow down to a crawl. It is as if I had all of the time in the world to plot out what adjustments I could make to minimize the danger, and then wait while the action unfolded to make the right move of the sequence at the right time.

This is really an unusual experience, although a number of other persons have reported the slowing down of external events (I think our brains and perception just work must faster, so the change is relative). John Brodie, who played quarterback for the 49-ers years ago also reported this sort of thing happening during a game.

 

[ruthless]

"It is as if I had all of the time in the world to plot out what adjustments I could make to minimize the danger, and then wait while the action unfolded to make the right move of the sequence at the right time.

This is really an unusual experience, although a number of other persons have reported the slowing down of external events (I think our brains and perception just work must faster, so the change is relative). "

i live my life everyday like that.

this might seem silly, but i believe time does not exist. let me explain.

i believe time is just a measurement to track events. i believe when god made everything, time was not included. humans came along and made that. just like numbers, letters, and languages. these things were made to help define the undefinable. yes, physics, math, and time all work, but they are all missing something. something that no living person will ever know, in my humble opinion.

 

[bogz]

Well Darby convinced me that time does exist when he told me the story about Muons that keep their own time. It's an artifact of matter, not of our minds.

 

[wa1ex]

Time not existing is a possibility. Remember The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future.

As far as we can tell, time is a one-way process....it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

Carlo Rovelli thinks we are about to see another temporal breakthrough just around the corner....if he turns out to be right what would it be?


Something to think about:

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html

 

[Darby]

We don't actually have any real concept of "now". The speed of light restriction limits our perception to the past. No matter what happens, in the sense what we observe it, the perception that we receive is always a matter of receiving information from the past.

What this means is that we can know about the past (memory in whatever form) and we can make conjectures about the future. But what we can't state for a fact is anything about the present. We can estimate to a very good approximation about what is occuring "now". We can't fully perceive the "present" no matter how far away the event that we are contemplating is distant from us. One meter in distance equals 1/300,000,000 of a second. That doesn't seem like a lot of time, but during the creation epoc immediately following the Big Bang there is a period of time when it equaled "forever".

When we try to make predictions about what is going on in the Milky Way galaxy or other parts of the universe we are simply using the known laws of physics and applying them to what information we receive, in the form of photonic energy, from distant stars or galaxys. We assume, and it is a good assumption, that the laws of physics are consistent over time and that the information that we receive is valid "today" even though the information might be decades or eons old when the light arrives here on Earth.

 

[Packerbacker]

Our 'now' may be strung out that it is not a 'point' but an area.

One question that has occured to me is, "How do I know where I actually am in time?" Suppose I am mentally transported back to my high school graduation without the baggage of memories. I might seem, as it no doubt did at that time, that all sorts of futures were possible. I might actually, as I did, feel I had free will. But I would be repeating the same choices for the same reasons, thinking I was making a real decision.

If such were the case, then how do I know where I am now?

/ttiforum/images/graemlins/confused.gif

 

[RainmanTime]

Hey PB,

Our 'now' may be strung out that it is not a 'point' but an area.

I'm with ya, bro. But I would suggest we first entertain moving from a 'point' idea of the present (now) to a 'line' representation. This is exactly what my theory of Massive SpaceTime suggests when I claim that "Time is a 3-dimensional vector just like Space." I believe one can create a direct analogy between Time and Space in the following (arbitrarily selected, but mutually orthogonal) reference frames:

Space Vector --> (X, Y, Z)
Time Vector --> (Past, Present, Future)

We continue the analogy between these two by realizing we can set up a linear scale for each of the orthogonal dimensions. Specifically, in an X-Y-Z spatial coordinate system we select some arbitrary reference point in space and call it (0,0,0). From this arbitrary origin we can track "+" and "-" displacements (in X, Y, and Z directions) relative to that common reference point.

I maintain the same is true of "extant Time" (which is different than the human-perceived 1-dimensional notion of Time). Therefore, what we call "now" in terms of a "point in Time" is really nothing more than our arbitrary reference (0-point) on the subdimension of Time we call the Present. So if we now consider that "Present" is really more like a line, than a single point, that means we can have "time displacements" in the "+" and "-" directions from our personal reference point in our "Present". But what would be the physical significance to us of a "+" or "-" displacement of time relative to our perceived "Now"? I would suggest the physical significance has a direct relationship to quantum probabilities in the QM wave equation model. Our reference point for "Now" simply pegs our individual (measured) perception as a single, realized measurement in a probability field. If you think in terms of the standard Gaussian distribution (bell-shaped curve), then our (Now=0) point represents the peak of the curve (x-bar, for those familiar with statistics nomenclature). That would mean the physical significance of the "+" and "-" time displacments from (Now=0) represent probabalistic displacements from the mean (x-bar) on the Gaussian curve. Interestingly enough, such a model could well explain (in a quantifiable manner) why it is that two people may perceive a single event differently... each person has their own unique reference point for (Now=0) and each person will perceive the event with certain biases which will put them at different points on the Gaussian curve. In essence, this model physically permits two different people to observe two different events in what we would normally consider a "shared present".

Of course, this same analogy would apply to the subdimensions of Time we know as Past and Future. Both of these are anchored with arbitrary, but relative, reference points (Past=0, Future=0), and each has "+" and "-" displacments away from these reference points. And yes, there is a physical significance to each of these concepts which can be explained in terms of the human imagination (i.e. ability to imagine something that never happened on our existing timeline). But more importantly, one should consider that a 3-D "reference frame of Time" can be set up for each individual that "fixes" their location in the larger 3-D Time field. Just like I can say that, in a spatial reference frame, I designate my current position on the earth (and in space) as being the (0,0,0) point... I can do the same thing with Time. Specifically, I can nominate points in my personal timeline of my life as being reference points for Past, Present, and Future. This would allow us to speak of "distances in Time" just as we speak of "distances in Space" between any two bodies (or any two people).

I think it is a highly useful extension of the concept of Time. And the best part about it is that one need not invent ANY new mathematics, for the existing mathematics already applies. All one needs to do is extend Time from being a 1-D scalar concept to a 3-D vector concept.

RMT

 

[Darby]

Packerpacker,

Our 'now' may be strung out that it is not a 'point' but an area.

Good job.

In Minkowskian jargon you are not a "point". Your worldline is actually a "world tube". If you look at your evolution over time your worldline is a tube that represents your body and it is extended in space-time over your lifetime. Side worldlines leave and merge with your worldline when you eat, drink, sluff off skin, lose hair, engage in other "bodily functions", etc. When you die and decay the individual atoms and molecules leave your world tube and go on about they way.

 

[Packerbacker]

RMT:

To change the subject, check out the photo of the latest crop circle at www.earthfiles.com . It has a six pointed star in the center and values of 18 and 36. This is not something two guys with boards and ropes could have produced.

What's going on here? Is Steve Alexander a clever hoaxer or a photographer? Frankly, the design is impressive whoever made it.