Dumb Tom Question About "Time"

Got it, again.

Yer blowin' my mind, man.

According to a book called "The Disappearance of the Universe," by Gary Renard (and I should state up front that this is a New Age text, i.e., Renard is no Brian Greene -- but still . . .), everything in the universe, including time, is a symptom of duality, or split mind. The Big Bang was some sort of breaking away from a more perfect state of unity, a dimension in which time is meaningless and only the infinite exists. If you were to visit that dimension "now," you would find that all the events that have taken place in our universe since the Big Bang never really happened -- how could infinity include this blip in which time seems real? (These ideas are nothing new to Buddhists of Hindus, of course.) But getting back to the slightly less abstract: Doesn't Brian Greene explain the mystery of the direction of time as having something to do with entropy? Perhaps a definition of time that didn't rely on temporal language would be something like "the perceived framework within which entropy is possible." This "framework" may in fact be an illusion. But for now, it's pretty much all we've got, so we're stuck with it.

Don't worry about it all. We are in the good hands of evangelicals and they will take us right to Armageddon.

I find the most elegant definition of time as movement through space. It's simple and it ties it together with space (the whole space-time continuum thing). If you think about it, does time have any meaning without movement. The hands on a clock move to mark time. To mark time, something has to move, a pendulum, a vibrating quartz crystal, an atom.

Dear Tom Shroder:

Why don't you read Edward T. Hall's 1983 book, "The Dance of Life: The Other Dimesion of Time." In looking at the title page of my copy of the book, I see that I made a handwritten note, "Begun reading daylight savings time (caret) day, April 24, 1983. Did I expect someone to have this book 100 years from now or think that perhaps an extra-terrestrial would find it several milleniums from now? What was I thinking?

Of course, George Lucas is the Modesto (Calif.) homeboy and one can't help but think of his Sith adventure opening May 19. What a leap in time from "American Grafitti" to "Star Wars"!

Anyhow, between your thoughts, Tom, on 1492, and the time continuum, I have now determined that I have more in common with you than with Joel. I propose that we grab a blanket, some good books about the subject of time, a jug of wine, and a loaf of bread, and have a nice picnic.

Joel may tag along. In fact my credo has always been the more the merrier, given reasonable and manageable numbers. Why, it could become a veritable book club. Think Oprah would be interested? Of course, the purpose shall be to have a very good TIME!

Time is caused by change--rather time and change cause each other--i.e. If things become different then there are two states-before and after the change--if things do not change in any way then there is one state and there is no time. Since entropy in the universe is always increasing then there is a constant discovery of new states with a sequencial memory of prior states resulting in time.

Reminds me of that old song. Since it'll be playing in my head for the next hour, I thought I'd share it so that others might have that same "pleasure" (yeah, right).

"Time Has Come Today" - The Chambers Brothers

Time has come today
Young hearts can go their way
Can't put it off another day
I don't care what others say
They say we don't listen anyway
Time has come today
(Hey)

Hey jlessl, less cowbell, OK?

bc

I obviously don't understand any of this, and here is proof.
If Time were a dimension of the universe and The Universe consisted of four dimensions or more. The question might then be :why does nature need time? The answer may be the persistence of things that exist in nature to continue to exist. The present complexity(OR AS LITTLE OF IT AS WE PERCEIVE) of the universe might not exist without the dimension of time. If energy and matter appear to change states then time might be needed to confine such existence to either state(complexity). A point in existence is not defined without time in the four dimensional universe and yet all of the things that make up the universe could exist without time- energy, light, ordinary matter- but time might be the dimension of nature that might complete the state of the existence of every other thing. In a simpler universe one in which all energy and matter existed in a state where one could not be distinguished from the other( e.g. a singularity), time might not exist or if it did exist, the complexity within that singularity could be infinite and time would complete that definition of existence by esentially cancelling itself out like a constant on both sides of an equaion. Time then is not conjecture of the human mind but a dimension of the universe or nature. If more dimensions were added then time might appear or function differently.
See I told you I don't understand any of this!

"If you study science long enough, and seriously enough, and don't come out sounding wacko, you haven't understood a thing!"
-- Fred Alan Wolf, in the film "What the [Bleep] Do We Know?!

Time ? It's a magazine. Pick it up on newstands near you. It's a little more "newsy" than Newsweek, but still a good bathroom read...

The subject of time as a measurable quantity or as a dimension in 4-D space came up (often) in grad school (physics). No conclusions. It's clear that time occupies a rather special category in the features that we use to describe the universe, in that we can't really define it, we just use it. One of the professors noted that Feynmann had wrestled with the issue of "if there were more than one dimension of time, how could we tell?" There's more to be said on that subject, but it's all geeky, so I'll spare you.

As the old saying goes, "Time is that which keeps everything from happening at once"...

I think there's lots of ways to interpret time.

There's the classic models as pointed out by Tom as described by Webster's, which hold up well for Newtonian physics, and as I understand it, seem to be workable for Enisteinian theories of relativity, taking into account space and time warping under conditions such as high relative velocities and the gravity "wells" of objects with mass.

As scientists probe into quantum scales and string theory, I've heard some describe the timeline as wave functions that don't ever actually collapse, but bifurcate when they hit obstacles or events in the continuum. In this case, we're all just be surfing one big time wave (or thread?) in the many worlds/"multiverse". Presumably, time travel and travel between multiverses would be accomplished by figuring out how to jump from wave to wave, and could essentially be the same thing.

Oy, these metaphors...

There's other aspects of time and relativity that I find interesting, and that has some relation to those dammed uncertain "observers", who can't ever seem to be able to locate their golf balls or tell you what brand/model they're playing at the same time.

I think that we've all noticed that time seems to go very quickly under certain conditions (parents are familar with this), and extremely slowly under others. For example, one of my hobbies is driving race cars. When I'm focusing my concentration at a level required to do this well (call it "the zone"), I can percieve, process, and react to events at a very high rate compared to my normal event comprehension rate. I can later describe what I saw, thought and did over a few seconds of time after the fact for a half hour, or write a few hundred words about it. From my perspective, time seemed to slow a great deal. To an observer, they may have seen two cars go around at turn at 90 mph a few inches apart over the course of 5 or 6 seconds, to the people driving the cars there may have been dozens of discrete events thoughts, and observations. I won't get into Special and General relativity here, but to say that I don't think that accounts for a people's perceptions of car crashes that seem to take forever, or a shortstop's ability to judge the hops of a line drive, and gauge the correct throw to stop a base runner.

So then, I'll say that perhaps there are elements of spacetime that are in our heads. I wonder if each of our wonderful minds aren't probability wave generators capable of warping space and time. And if so, how I can leverage that to get the lawn mowed, the laundry done, and a couple extra hours of sleep every night?

All I need is a little more time.

bc

As I have always thought of it...."Time is for tombstones, whats your hurry".

PS, sorry about the typos above.

bc

my websters says:
"every moment there has ever been or will be."

Ah, but "moment" is a time-related concept. So we still haven't really answered Tom's question.

Come to think of it, "has" and "will" are also time related. The definition we are seeking probably can't involve either the past tense or the present tense, right? Tom?

Oops, I mean the past tense or the FUTURE tense. And I will never correct anyone's word usage again.

If someone asked me what is time, I'd ay that If you want to meet someone, You have to tell them four things.

You could tell them:

(Longitude,Lattitude,Altitude,Time)

or:

(1 cross street, another cross street, Floor number, Time) okay this doesn't work out perfectly, because cross steets aren't exact.

Anyway, you always give four numbers.

That fourth number that's tough to wrap your head around, that one is time.

An interesting question, but is it unique to time? Can you define any of the other dimensions without reference to distance-related words?

So far we've come up with definitions of time as change, meaning, dimension, waves, movement (and a magazine).

My favorite is bc's observation about "observers". I guess we're stuck within the confines of our little brains....maybe we're not evolved enough yet to grasp what should be a simple, universal concept. That would explain why some people are always late....

I highly recommend Tom to read Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Time is something I know what it is without explaining it,

But if I were asked to explan it, then I know I don't know what it is.

I can't believe I'm so intrigued by Tom's question about the definition of time.
But I am.
I was going to define it based on the rising and setting of the sun. (As in the kind of time that makes me late.)
But then I started wondering if it could be defined as "an answer to the question 'When?'"
But you could answer 'When?' as "when pigs fly" or "when hell freezes over" or "when your father gets home" none of which has anything to do with the sun. And can you plot that on a graph?

does anybody really know what time it is?
does anybody really care? --Chicago

This is an interesting discussion, but doesn't seem to have too much to do with Tom's question. Tom's question is about dictionaries, not physics; I'm sure you'd find equally tautological definitions of 'time' in dictionaries which preceded the theory of special relativity and the unified conception of space-time it entails.

The question is, in fact, ill-posed. Dictionaries define words in terms of other words, all of which are, in turn, defined in the same dictionary. The process is inherently self-referential, and no more so for 'time' than for 'woman,' in fact. ("An adult female human," according to dictionary.com. But what's a female? An adult? A human? More words.)

Dictionaries are effective when they provide definitions for unfamiliar or obscure words or concepts in terms of more familiar words or concepts. Perhaps Tom's complaint is that, since 'time' is such a familiar word expressing a concept so absolutely essential to our existence in every way, any words used to fix its meaning will necessarily seem redundant.

Yes, 'past', 'present' and 'future' are aspects of time, but no more so than 'female' and 'human' are aspects of women.

Summing up, to quoth the bard:

"Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana."