Is linear time just a mental illusion?
If time means nothing to a photon, should it mean anything to any of us?
Is our apparent conception of linear time just a result of an illusory mental ordering that is on such a small scale (by the standards of the entire universe) that although it seems real to us is really not at all what it appears?
Are all things actually happening at once?
Is our apparent conception of linear time just a result of an illusory mental ordering that is on such a small scale (by the standards of the entire universe) that although it seems real to us is really not at all what it appears?
Are all things actually happening at once?
Comments (36)
If one wishes to experience real time (duration) just close your eyes and feel time being created by the mind. It may feel very, very slow.
No. Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once.
What does it mean to say that "time means nothing to a photon"? Is it to say that time doesn't pass, or that the photon doesn't change?
Quoting Mike AdamsSo I am born, live and die all at once? Obama and Trump are president at the same time? If find this concept of everything happening at once impossible to understand.
Time is measured change. Change happens and is relative. Because it is relative, it allows us to measure it, which we call time.
Linear time: The past, the present, the future have to flow into each other in a specific sequence: past-present-future.
Non-linear time: The past, the present and the future, all, exist at the same time. There is no specific sequence and if there appears to be so, it's an illusion.
Is this what you mean?
NO...then what do you mean?
YES...Well, what does it mean to say that the past, the present and the future, all, exist at the same time? I like to use space to make sense of this. We don't dispute that all events (past, present, future) can occur at the same place e.g. all events in human history have taken place at one and the same place - Earth. Could we, then, extend this thought to time itself and claim all events (past, present, future) occur at the same time? For this to be reasonable, the flow of time must be an illusion too. Otherwise how could we say that all events are occurring at the same time?
Well, without change time wouldn't make sense at all. Imagine a universe without motion or any kind of change. How would we measure time and would time be of any significance at all. Imagine you're immortal; would time matter to you? So, change is essential for time. Given this is so, we can imagine a world without time. In such a world the past, the present and future, all, will be identical. Thus making time non-linear or even non-existent.
However, in a world with change, time does flow and that makes it impossible for the past, the present and the future to occupy the same point in time. I think non-linear time is an incoherent concept.
There is a flavor of non-linear time in the experience of recurrent phenomena. The coffee I'm drinking this morning is the same as the coffee I drank yesterday morning. The learned patterns by which I navigate the world recur, just like every tomorrow will have a 7:00 am (with the Sun at it's seasonal point). We can time stamp a peculiar set of relations relative to another periodic phenomenon but I might soon forget.
Everything that matters, that remembers itself, that persists in-itself, is enabled by recurrence in contrast with change. As the poet, William Blake, said two minutes ago: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."
The body that I inhabit today is by some measures the same as it was yesterday but different by some other measures. You can and can't step in the same river twice, depending upon whether it is (provisionally) the same river you're stepping in.
Well they can't exist at the same time, but the intention in meaning is some sort of crossover perhaps. Special relativity teaches us that the order of events is observer dependent.
Another possible intention in saying they exist "at the same time" is perhaps that they exist together in some sort of container. I think general relativity possibly supports the notion of "block spacetime", which is that the whole of spacetime is one gigantic block that doesn't change. It has a philosophical counterpart I believe in "eternalism", which is a sort of democracy of all points of spacetime - they simply exist in and of themselves without a flow of time.
Yes, time is relative (so they say). According to Theory of Relativity (note I'm not an expert), time depends on the frame of reference i.e. a perspective A may show time x but another perspective, B, will show time y. However, within the same perspective A or B or whatever, time flow is linear. At least that's what I think is the case.
Quoting Jake Tarragon
Yes, block time makes sense but trivially so. Take our everyday experience by the watch. Every second ticks by and we move from the present into the future and leave the past. However, our entire experience of time can be put into a block - say a day, or a month, year, decade, etc. So, in a sense, the past, present and future for a certain duration of time, can be grouped in a single block of time. However, this is an uninteresting observation because it doesn't reveal anything about the nature of time. It's just a conceptual schema.
Time means nothing to the photon, but it does mean something to any particle with mass. Relativistically-speaking, mass has a meaningful temporality because it can go slower than lightspeed. It enjoys a range of temporal rates that is bounded by absolute rest and the speed of light.
For a photon, we can say that its journey is over the same instant it began. Time as we think of it doesn't really exist for a massless particle. But a particle with mass "experiences" a range of clock speeds. So it makes a difference if my twin heads off in a rocket at near light speed while I remain in a rest mass inertial frame. One of us is going to look a lot older than the other the next time we meet.
Can't happen. Relativity requires reciprocity in all frames of reference. Neither traveler can be viewed as growing older.
P.S. I know you read it or heard it some where and are just parroting. Ask for a refund.
I always noticed that those who parroted the best did the best in science class. Memorize and parrot.
Remember: all frames of reference are reciprocal. The muons don't behave any differently in any frames of reference according to Relativity. You see, I understand.
So they have an inverse relationship, and yet are the same? Did 1/x = x/1 when you went to school, getting your mighty fine grades while apparently parroting nothing and questioning everything?
I think you need to add reciprocals as another basic principle you completely fail to understand.
Ho, ho! Trying to slip out from under the rubble of the wreck of your own argument.
Reciprocality says there is a "preferred" and absolute connection between two inertial frames. So if it looks like acceleration going from frame A to frame B, it looks like a matching deceleration going in the other direction.
You do understand the difference between inertia and acceleration? You got an A for that back at school?
BTW, they is no direction either. Humans are accelerating away from the muons which are sitting still. You just like making things up on the fly. More of your "scientific doubletalk"? I really wonder how many forum members actually believe the gobblygook you post? Did you just predict the death of the universe as fact? My guess is many buy into your nonsense. After all it's scientific fact and who better to proselytize scientific myths and fantasies. Science can't even predict what will happen tomorrow, but a billion, billion years from now? Why not? It's a very, very long time.
BTW, I am loving every moment of this as you display monumental ignorance of STR? Or would you prefer to just toss STR out for the moment because it is inconvenient?
So you support your position of there being no preferred frame by stating your preference for a frame?You support the reciprocality principle by denying it applies between two frames?
Wow. Your grades as school must have been spectacular. You can't seem to make a single point that isn't a self-contradiction.
I said no preferred frames of reference. The muon can be said to be at rest and thus there is no effect on its decay.
Who the heck am I talking to. A kid?
You know, you are, like good scientist, suppose to say that STR does not apply to accelerating systems, and then I'm suppose to ask you, then where the heck is there such a thing as a non-accelerating system?
Then you are suppose to throw out STR as being universally irrelevant, and nd then I throw out STR time, linear and all. And then you are left with GTR time which is ?????, well definitely not linear.
Am I missing too fast for your you? No worry, just turn it around, and you'll be moving too fast for me.
So you can subtract away all acceleration to arrive at an inertial frame. But after constraining second derivative motion to get first degree motion, how do you actually arrive at actual zeroeth degree motion - this "proper rest" you want to talk about?
This is why the reciprocity is between the second and first degree derivatives of motion, not between some absolute frame with matchingly absolute resting coordinates.
To put any rate on a muon's decay, some reference frame must be established as your chosen coordinate basis. Conventionally one can make that the global cosmic backdrop. That seems safe enough for SR purposes. A muon's decay could be then measured against that as its inertial frame. A slow muon could be compared to a fast muon from some general cosmic point of view.
But to claim baldly that a muon has some proper spacetime coordinate all of its own - a zeroeth derivative - shows you haven't really thought this relativistic measurement business through.
Quoting Rich
You seem really confused. Perhaps you don't get the consequences of SR adopting a Minkowski geometry framework where spacetime is united as four dimensions? That means we can map one inertial frame onto another via a Lorentz transformation. Length contraction and time dilation - the reciprocality - gets handled automatically by now being built into the mathematical structure. The constant c - lightspeed - is now the scaling factor. So you get that inverse relation, c/1 vs 1/c, hardwired in as a new universal constraint.
Restmass arises as the possibility of going slower than c - so slow as to be "at rest". And a muon at rest is experiencing much more time due to dilation, so its decay comes as fast as it possibly can. A muon travelling at near the speed of light has a clock that ticks slower, so its decay is stretched out. All this of course being the view we are seeing having fixed our frame of reference so that one muon is not moving relative to us, the other is moving at near lightspeed.
Which nicely brings me back to my first reply to the OP.