What is time?
Offline It seems to me that time can't be defined as an actual force in the universe nor a dimension, but rather something like a measurement of occurances and order in which the laws of the physics are at work. I always find it so puzzling why so many people refer to time as something actual, since I've never been able to understand it as such. I'd greatly appreciate someone who's dwelled in the issue to answer to me and everyone else who wonders about time, in any way they find suitable.
The interesting part to me is where the implication of this "time notion" comes in, that, it had to be a "beginning" to the universe; a reference to a position in the measurement of what we call time. Why are we more puzzled then with When the universe was created than with Where it ends, in terms of lenght, width and height? Is it because time is more confusing to us than lenght or any other measurement? This to me is truly interesting stuff, I hope we can all sort it out here in this thread.
Thanks brothers and sisters for a truly great forum.
Sincerely,
Max
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Time is in effect no different from width or height. It's merely a measurement of a distance between two points on an axis.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Thanks Vastet for your consice point on the matter!
I concur, but I would like to know why people obsess about finding a beginning to something wich must be infinite by it's own criteria, i.e "when did the universe begin?" or "where does it end?". Is it seems we're prone to find and answer to these questions because it seems like we Should find an answer within our way of thinking as something being of a certain time span, width, lenght or height when in reality we haven't done any measurement, just the assumption of that one would be possible. Maybe I'm drifting, but it just seems unmeasurable in terms of time, width, lenght and height.
Time is an illusion. but becasue we are born into this illusion we can not think of it in any other way, there's simply no way that a human being can concieve time in any other fashion. Scientificaly, time is a direct consequence of speed, if all of a sudden, the earth would stop turning and the universe would stop expanding, then you would have a freeze frame when time would become infinity or if you could travel with the speed of light, or close to it, you could slow time where years would be like seconds to you.
but until some very distant future that we can develop the technology to beat the speed of light, it's more or less useless to think about the origins of time, it would be like trying to explain to a cockroach why chess is a better game than checkers
It is true. Time is an illusion, everything has and always will have been here. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only redistributed so you can come to the conclusion that the basic existence of... well everything not just us but matter and whatnot has always and will always be around. It is in this concept that time becomes an illusion because we only look at something through a time-line because we ourselves have limited existences. But there is no beginning or end for energy... so time has no meaning. Time is a human term. :]
"Why would God send his only son to die an agonizing death to redeem an insignificant bit of carbon?"-Victor J. Stenger.