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What is "Time"

T

TheDance511

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 5, 2007
359
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California soon
Okay new question... i have always wondered what time is... is it a thing like a material thing not material but a thing..or is it a state of being? or is it just there because we imagine it...and if so how can we imagine it if there is nothing there? Confusing?:confused: ? i know but thats why i asked:apple:
 
I believe it's a magazine, but I might be wrong.

TIME_Person_of_the_Year_2006.jpg
 
Different people have different ideas about time, some scientific and some philosophical.

The first section of the Wiki seems to be what you want...
There are two distinct views on the meaning of time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed.[1]
A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[2] and Immanuel Kant,[3][4] in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the mental measuring system. The question, perhaps overly simplified and allowing for no middle ground, is thus: is time a "real thing" that is "all around us", or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events?
Many fields avoid the problem of defining time itself by using operational definitions that specify the units of measurement that quantify time. Regularly recurring events and objects with apparent periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples are the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, and the swing of a pendulum.
Time has long been a major subject of science, philosophy and art. The measurement of time has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in astronomy. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human lifespans.
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Chicago had a bead on it, some time back: "Does anybody really know what time it is. Does anybody care?' Spending adequate time in Latin America will not help answer your question, I'm certain. It does move faster, behind the wheel of a car, when one is late to an appointment. That is all.
 
There are three arrows of time.

1 - conscious time, the way we all percieve time to be passing

2 - the direction in which the universe is expanding

3 - the direction in which entropy is increasing
 
I don't know what "time" is, but I do know people view it very differently. Take my wife and I for example. When I say I'm planning on getting off work at 5:00, in my head all I really mean is "I'll try to get off work in the vicinity of 5:00, which may mean all the way to 6:30". When she says 5:00, she means 5:00.
 
Originally Posted by Einstein
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
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Sit with a pretty girl on a hot stove, and time shall be no more.
 
"A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future."

Bonus geek points to whomever correctly identifies the relevance of that quote to :apple:
 
Time is not constant. It is relative to each living thing. For example if you stood in the centre of a room and I walked around the room with a friend, we would infact be moving forward in time, relative to you. However relative to my friend walking alongside me I would not be going any further in time than him.

:confused:

Visualise a glass tube that is closed at both ends. There is a particle of light (photon) trapped inside this tube and because light is the only known *'constant' in the universe it bounces from the top to the bottom of tube at the speed of light. To make things easier to imagine though slow the photon down to 1 second for each top to bottom action. This help you see it in your head a bit more :D Ok, you have two of these 'light clocks' you give one to me and you keep one.

If you look at your clock in your hand you can see the particle moving up and down at a constant speed. And if you look at mine while im stood next to you it does the same. However if I start to walk around the room my clock seems to slow down from where you are looking at it, because the photon has further to travel because as it bounces up towards the top of the tube it has to go at a diagonal angle to reach the top as I am moving so my clock relative to yours is running slower. So because mine is running slower and yours remains as it was i seem to be travelling forward in time.

Theres something to pickle your brain. ;) That is why satellites have to take into account their speed around the earth and shave off time from their clocks or else all our TV shedules would be screwed. :D

*Light is constant because if you were travelling at the speed of light then turned your headlights on. The light from the headlights would still travel away from you at the speed of light.

EDIT: Oh and to directly answer your question. Time is the fourth dimension. Imagine going to a meeting. You have the directions. These include the 2 dimensions of X and Y. The meeting is on the 20th floor of a building, this is the Z dimension and the time to be at the meeting is the fourth.
 
Jaffa Cake said:
Was that an old QuickTime easter egg or something? I remember being shown a couple of tricks (albeit totally useless ones) years ago and I think that was one of them...
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You win! In System 7.x --> MacOS 9.x, if you turned on 'Balloon Help' and placed the pointer over the QuickTime extension, that's what was displayed.
 
namdoog said:
You need scale even for memory, otherwise you can't say when something happened.
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Yes but because time is not constant there needs to be a point to be able to reference events in relation to others. So we start at 0AD. Without this reference point we could not determine when things happened. This reference point is not time itself, it is a reference to a certain point in time so which we can measure from it.
 
The lay person will tell you simply "time is the fourth dimension" and leave it at that. Physicists will give you a variety of theories, but most physicists will tell you that time is not only a dimension, but it is a dimension that is precisely the same type of thing as length or width. This, of course, gets complicated by the fact that time isn't constant, and can actually be contorted.

If you really want to know what time is, though, you should look to contemporary philosophers. They won't agree about what time is, so they can't just tell you, but they will tell you more about it than anyone else can. There was a 20th century philosopher named McTaggart that gave an argument that the traditional conception of flowing time with a privileged present is paradoxical. The argument is kind of complicated, but most people accept that there is in fact a paradox.

Because of this paradox, philosophers have largely been divided into two camps.
First, there is what is referred to as the B-series account of time. On this account, every moment of time is eternal, and nothing ever changes. There isn't much of an account of how we perceive the present, but suffice it to say things aren't actually changing, they just look like they are. This is a very old view of time, and even though it is a little bit counter-intuitive, it is not paradoxical, and it helps us to understand the world (and by world i mean universe) as a four dimensional spacetime, which fits will with much of our physics and lay understanding of things.
Second, there is a group of philosophers known as presentists. Presentism can come in different forms, but basically it avoids the McTaggartian paradox by denying that the past and future exist.

There have also been various arguments given that time and change are effectively one and the same. There are nice counter arguments to this, but I don't think anyone has really agreed one way or the other. In most contexts, it makes sense to talk about time and change together.
 
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