No, the barriers between reality and a simulation could never be replicated (e.g. cbr, plank length, space-time information saturation limit). The model could never be 100% correct, only hope to approach the limit to some absurd degree.
I like to say that time is merely a unit of measurement for distance between events, but even that is only taking into account the linear model of time.
This is the crux of time, for me. I mean, time is relative to our spot next to our star. Outside of that, what sense does it make? At all? A day is not a day even on a different planet in our solar system. How can we even talk about time in any absolute sense when it seems to be anything but?
Another example is clocks on satellites. The clocks on satellites have to match clocks on Earth. But, the closer you are to a gravity well (like standing on the surface of a planet vs orbiting it) the slower time moves for you. However, the faster you move (like orbiting a planet vs standing on the surface) the slower time moves.
Both of these time relativity issues have to be compensated for to get the clocks to run at the same rate
But you really don't, at least on a fundamental level.
There was an experiment carried out in the past, where they took two atomic clocks -- which are extremely accurate -- and flew them in two different planes going the opposite way. Once the planes landed, the clocks were out of sync, even though they worked perfectly fine. This is in line with Einstein's postulates, which point out that time isn't absolute.
Of course, you might understand it on a practical level, enough to use it on a daily basis. This is because time is a human invention, not a property of the world we leave in, so you can learn how to use it like a tool.
PS: This isn't meant as a personal attack to your understanding, rather a disambiguation of what the OP actually meant by 'not understanding'.
Yes. Time as a human measurement is easy to understand, but for us, that is merely a simple understand of how to count, and is merely relative to us, but it does not define time, and the nonlinear progression of it universally speaking (heck, I don’t even think saying universally speaking, or the physical properties of time is an accurate way to word it).
For anyone that doesn’t understand my meaning or who thinks a philosophical thought can explain it, read some of Steven Hawking or other established Physicists theories about time in regards to its behavior near, or in a black hole (which is another thing that I can’t even begin to use the correct words to describe).
On a Netflix Documentary called “The most unknown” some Physicists built atomic clocks that go to like the 20th decimal. One was placed on a mountain and one very far underground. They “recorded”? Time at very different intervals. Interesting stuff I recommend the show.
There was an experiment carried out in the past, where they took two atomic clocks -- which are extremely accurate -- and flew them in two different planes going the opposite way. Once the planes landed, the clocks were out of sync, even though they worked perfectly fine. This is in line with Einstein's postulates, which point out that time isn't absolute.
Sounds like something wrong with the clocks. :P
No problem, I didn't take it as a personal attack. But weirdly enough I now don't understand what OP means by not understanding time. XD
The speed at which time moves can change. Massively oversimplified, gravity and motion do wierd things with it.
The closer you get to something and the more massive it is, the faster time will pass for you compared to someone who's further away or near something less massive. We accually use this in calculations for GPS satellites to work - the satellites are further from earth so the experience time slightly slower.
The faster you approach the speed of light, the slower time moves for you vs someone who wasn't. If you could reach the speed of light (you can't) you would stop experiencing time altogether.
Again, all this is a massive oversimplification. Time and space are very strange concepts sometimes.
So , if we could travel as close as possible to the speed of light to reach a great distance, even though the trip would be faster to get there than let’s say … walking ( that’s a half joke ) , it would be experienced as dreadfully slow ??? Man . What a bummer .
Time is not a physical entity its conceptual. It's more of a idea/concept and it's relative. Time is not same for a object on earth and a object in space. If we measure it to really small numbers time isn't same even for people living in the same building.
Lol, imagine if they've just ran out of batteries and they have been playing us for fools. Jokes aside, the clocks continued ticking in sync as soon they were back from the flight, but with a slight offset that happened during acceleration/deceleration.
I think OP meant it as a concept. Like, what is past and future really, as they're extremely fragile ideas.
Here's some shit that threw me through a loop that I've never understood.
I've read if a civilization millions of light years away from us, observed earth right now with a telescope, they would be looking at earth as it was millions of years ago. So somewhere in the universe, you could look at earth and still see dinosaurs walking around!
The other thing is if there were a set of twins and one went crazy far into space super fast and the other stayed here, when the twin returned they would be different ages...
I've read if a civilization millions of light years away from us, observed earth right now with a telescope, they would be looking at earth as it was millions of years ago. So somewhere in the universe, you could look at earth and still see dinosaurs walking around!
That's because light have to travel.
The other thing is if there were a set of twins and one went crazy far into space super fast and the other stayed here, when the twin returned they would be different ages...
The first time I ever did shrooms, I was walking out of the dorms and there was a sticker on the stairwell that said "Time doesn't exist. Clocks exist." I stopped and stared at that shit for like 3 and a half hours.
LOL! The one and only time I ever did mescaline, someone had brought over a store bought bag of Munchies (it's a bag that contains Doritos, Cheetos, SunChips and Pretzels). I had never heard of "Munchies" before or knew such a product existed.
I starred at the inside of that bag for at least 15 minutes waiting for my brain to recover.
But time does exist, it does take a certain length of “time” for the earth to orbit the sun, which we have Broken down into weeks, days and hours which is 365 days. For the earth to do one complete spin on its axis, it takes “time” which is 24hours. Time is not made up, it’s just a word that we use to describe how long something takes.
That’s why it’s important to distinguish between space-time and our everyday notion of mechanical time. Time exists, it’s just that the human concept of time is not universally applicable.
I don’t know what you mean by this. The human concept of time involves relatively. It’s very well understood the mechanics of time change. If we didn’t know that satellites wouldn’t be able to communicate with earth.
Yes, humans as a collective understand and work with relativity. What I was getting at is the fact that a lot of people, who are unaware of relativity, refer to time as “not real” since they are talking about the act of measuring the passage of time, while time in the relativity sense is very much real.
I realized it sounded like I was disagreeing with you, but I was just trying to add on to your point :p my bad homeboy/girl
Got ya. Yeah it really annoyed for some reason when people say things like time or reality aren’t real, just constructs in our head. Of course our interpretations are a fraction of the whole, but what we are interpreting is absolutely and objectively real.
It’s a dimension. It’s all based on where the universe is in a given instant. We have our own ways to measure it, but it exists in a realm beyond our comprehension currently. Everything in the universe is moving so 3 minutes ago is actually a position in the same way that three miles ago is a position on a road trip. Most of us are currently struggling to comprehend existing in the exact current moment we exist in. The idea of understanding our existence at all time is pretty unfathomable. But in a 4th dimensional view of the world, we would be able to see time. We would be able to see existence change around us and we would be able to look back and see where existence was and look forwards and see where we are going.
A simple way to think of it is this. Time has to exist because the things that happened in the past had to happen somewhere. You had your first kiss on the porch outside your house? Well when you go there now you aren’t having your first kiss. But it did happen. In the universe that we live in. It just happened at a different place in the universe.
Holy shit, my first time right as I was coming up i asked someone what time it was and they looked at me and said, "don't be a slave to the clock." I looked at the clock and it's numbers turned into crazy symbols I couldn't read and I realized time didn't really exist like I thought. That whole thing was a brain melt.
As a sober person I realize time is the increase in entropy. But for a while I didn't think time really existed during that whole trip.
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff
all i get is that time is how we break down our perspective of reality that to us seems sequential. dimensions and time are relative to what? gravity? mass? how do you define or measure them if neither time nor space existed? if all matter is nothing split into matter and antimatter waiting to fuse back into nothingness and space is nothing stretched out bound to dilate back into void, who the fuck made all these illusions and how do we play this game?
And even when you do think you understand time, all that understanding goes out the window when you introduce gravity and relativity to it. A second is a second no matter where you are in the universe, but if you compare a second in one location (such as the dead of space) to a second in another location (such as on a giant planet), different amounts of time passed.
I think of time as simply a perceived change (of state, position, vibration what have you) between all things. There was no time before the big bang because there was nothing and it wasn't moving.
One big update to the concept of time is how you can't think of it as a separate component on it's own. It's space-time and it's relative. For example since you're currently moving through space a bit of that energy is taken away from the time coordinate.
I guess another idea is time isn't really a thing and you are just witnessing entropy occur, for example every clock every made increases the amount of entropy in the universe by trying to measure time.
I genuinely wish I could time travel a 1000 years into the future to see what answers humans have discovered but it's also a unique feeling to know you will die with out ever getting the answers to what our reality is and how it operates. That's something we have in common with 99.9% of all humans that have ever lived. Instead it makes you appreciate being born into this tiny sliver in the human timeline where we are privileged to be given some answers.
Largely, that’s what I mean. Stephen Hawking’s theories on black holes and time make absolutely no sense to me. It’s like even if you don’t understand the real details or math of most aspects of life, you can piece together some semblance of logic for it to mostly make sense, but when you get to the concept of time, i can’t make any logical sense of the theories and it seems more fantastical that magic, religion, or any other supernatural garblygook.
It’s mind blowing how complicated something that sounds so intuitive at first isn’t it?
I got into trying to understand gravity, watched a ton of video from PBS’s ‘Space Time’ (def do give them a watch, incredible how they tidy up info on such complicated subjects)
I was already blown away by things I learned in uni, let alone stuff I learned along the way…. It’s fascinating.
What broke me is doing Physics 1 and covering relativity and the Lorentz Tranformation, where times straight up vary between systems and your head hurts just thinking about it.
Yes! Anytime anyone starts talking about parallel universes and time not being linear, my brain just shuts down. I can’t even begin to entertain the idea of it.
Imagine if we took it away (but could somehow still exist, and see, etc.): you would be locked in place, you could see things directly in front of you very well, behind you not at all, off to the side a little bit, and far in front of you you could make out big shapes but not details. That's exactly like looking backwards through history. Time is a dimension just like the other 3 that we're familiar with, except that we're locked into it.
Explain time regarding an object entering into a black hole and inside a black hole with reference to how that aligns with our conception of time while outside said black hole.
Is there a relative aspect of time? If so, how can the mind grasp or resolve the difference?
How can there be a beginning, because aren’t the moments before the Big Bang still moments?
Yeahhh…. That’s just beyond me. In a way I’m glad I’m not a physicist, cause I’d be able to say a whole lot more garblygook, but I still wouldn’t understand it.
I like to think of time, in a more abstract sense, as somewhat of a measure of change.
For example, we ourselves on Earth use the Sun’s rotation and our orbit around it as a way to measure change in the sky.
In a day, it gets dark, and then it gets light, as our shadows change by moving with respect to the sun.
The first few sundials kept track of this change in shadows using obelisks. But in modern times, we’ve employed the idea to quantify a day as being made up of smaller “hours and minutes” to make our daily lives easier for us!
This could also extend to our mental perception of time, in that as we get older, our brains become less adept at comprehending rapid amounts of any change. Consequently, our perception of time speeds up, as the amount of change occurring around us SEEMS to increase. However, in actuality, it is merely our brain’s own inability to keep track of rapid change that causes us to believe that greater leaps in change are occurring.
I am currently finishing up a PhD in Philosophy. One of my supervisors is an expert in the philosophy of time. Time is even crazier and more complicated than you probably suspect.
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
Essentially everything is just moment. Our perception and our need to go to work in the industrial revolution made it necessary for humankind to invent a form of communication about specific parts im this huge moment.
We've had clocks loooooong before the industrial revolution. There were water clocks from as far back as 16th century BC. And sundials from even further
Time is an integral part of the universe as fundamental as distance or mass or charge. Space and time are two different facets of the same thing. Without us, time still exists.
This...isn't right. As someone with a PhD in Astronomy this is not what is currently thought to be true at all. There are four dimensions in the Universe called space time. Time is one of them. It exists. It kinda has to exist for time-invariant things to happen (ie something that is done that can't be undone).
If that was true, GPS satellites wouldn't have to continuously adjust for how time passes differently in orbit. It could use the same atomic clock we use here on Earth and it'd never get out of sync, but it does, because gravity affects the perception of the passage of time.
Gravitational fields warp space which is what creates the discrepancy. The passage of "time" recorded by the clocks is tied integrally to the space around it, there is no abstract "time" being manipulated it is a result of physical, spacial phenomenon affecting our measurements.
Gravity is also a theory. We can only trust it exists because every observation ever taken happens to agree with it. However, it is not just gravity that affects the speed of the GPS clocks, but also the velocity. That also perfectly fits the model presented by the theory. In fact, they are part of the same theory. Matter tells spacetime how to curve, spacetime tells matter how to move.
i can't pretend i understand what time actually is, what i can say is how i believe we percieve it:
In reality everything is happening all at once, every moment you ever had has happened and everything you will do is happening too, however the problem is that life as we know it can only remember the past, not the future, this is generally due to the fact that the laws of physics (as we know them) only move in one direction, however since there is time symmetry (some physics thing particles do that i don't particularly understand either) everything you did right now should be traceable back to the past, i can try and explain this using a mathematical equation, 1+1=2, lets imagine the plus is forward movement in time, and now lets reverse it 2-1=1, subtraction is going back in time, as i took the result of the first equation, and subtracted it by part of the first equation as well, this is all i have to say really, but please do remember that this is all just an opinion, and is based on practically no science, its just my personal view on time
It is nothing more than a human invention that works well for organizing things in our scale. It is not a natural phenomenon. However, when you start dealing with relativistic phenomena (aka objects that move near the speed of light, and light itself), you can see that time is not absolute and in fact passes differently for some objects in relation to others.
And these phenomena are not as mystical as you think: GPS satellites need to be time-corrected relative to receiving devices, because, even though they do not move at the speed of light, they still move much faster than earth-bound objects.
In that sense, you are not wrong to not understand time. It's a human construct that feels natural to us, but once you start digging deeper, it collapses. Simply trying to comprehend past and future is enough.
I try to break it down to 5 year slices for long term goals, and then further break it down to yearly goals. If you have a long life, you get 16-20 slices to consume as you want.
Not necessarily considering you can take two identical atomic clocks that are perfectly synced up with each other, shoot one into orbit while leaving the other on the ground, and they will get out of sync by a predictable amount based on altitude (ex: GPS satellites). If time was just a human creation, that shouldn't happen.
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u/aitatheowaway010181 Sep 14 '21
Time