Does Time really exist?

[Andymac79]

Agreed, I am hopeful that even entanglement can be pushed back a bit to reveal that it isnt simultaneous causality which im not a fan of!

I think philosophy has at least as much to say about the concept of time than science does

[Vince1963]

You will, of course, agree that whether you (or I or anyone) understands it or not has absolutley no impact on whether it exists or not. I am sure that the Universe cares not one jot about our individual ability to understand how it works.

In effect, what you are doing is trying to build an argument from ignorance. When you say (and I paraphrase) "I don't understand something, therefore it must be..." you should really stop at this point ""I don't understand something" and then take a couple of steps back to the point where you do understand it (and that understanding should be backed up with verifiable evidence). From there, you can push on. Otherwise it's all too easy to end up in fantasy land.

Lots of people make the logical fallacy of argument from evidence. how many times have you heard something along the lines of "I don't believe that can happen, therefore it isn't real"?

Your right on the button Zakalwe.. I don't understand it, Much the same as everyone else on here, Not to say that people on here know less than me, I'm sure its the contrary. I purely bring up topics to stimulate a reaction and create debate, and encourage input to help not only me but others (who maybe afraid of making themselves look silly) in improving knowledge and understanding of the simple but yet so difficult to understand cosmology of our beautiful universe. Kind Regards Vince

[David Smith]

Your right on the button Zakalwe.. I don't understand it, Much the same as everyone else on here, Not to say that people on here know less than me, I'm sure its the contrary. I purely bring up topics to stimulate a reaction and create debate, and encourage input to help not only me but others (who maybe afraid of making themselves look silly) in improving knowledge and understanding of the simple but yet so difficult to understand cosmology of our beautiful universe. Kind Regards Vince

And maybe we learn something into the bargain! (Today I learned that my brain is too primitive )

[Treeden]

Time for a short musical interlude... because without time we wouldn’t have the following:

‘The Times They Are A Changin’’

Bob Dylan

‘Yesterday’

The Beatles

‘If I Could Turn Back Time’

Cher

‘Time After Time’

Cyndi Lauper

'Times Like These'

Foo Fighters

‘The Longest Time’

Bill Joel

‘Time Stands Still’

Rush

‘Good Times, Bad Times’

Led Zeppelin

‘Your Time is Gonna Come’

Led Zeppelin

‘How Many More Times’

Led Zeppelin

'2 Minutes to Midnight'

Iron Maiden

‘Clocks’

Coldplay

‘Time’

Pink Floyd

‘Time Is On My Side’

Rolling Stones

‘Rock Around The Clock’

Bill Haley And The Comets

‘Feels Like The First Time’

Foreigner

‘Time Warp’

Rocky Horror Picture Show

‘No Time This Time’

The Police

‘Time’

Madness

‘Give Me Time’

The Hollies

‘Right On Time’

Red Hot Chilli Peppers

‘Time Bomb’

The Ramones

‘The Night Time Is The Right Time’

Creedence Clearwater Revival

‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

Roberta Flack

'Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)'

Janet Jackson

‘Big Time’

Peter Gabriel

‘Wasted Time’

The Eagles

and many, many others, but here’s my favourite:

Louis Armstrong

Time to go......

[Qualia]

With reference to cause and effect the problem can also be approached purely on a conceptual grounds.

Firstly, a priori there is nothing in the 'cause' that will ever imply the 'effect' in an experiential vacuum. No matter how mundane or unique the given situation, we do not come to it as some blank slate but instead, we are dependent on previous impressions and resemblances and past experiences and knowledge and understandings to form analogous predictions. Awareness of causation, then, is itself merely a product of living - a time imbued experience.

Secondly, philosophers and most classical scientists have traditionally believed that to know something one must know the cause upon which it necessarily depends. But such knowledge is impossible. Awareness of relationships provides the basis for all human understanding concerning matters of fact and that quite unlike the relations of ideas explored by maths, no human judgment that is concerned with matters of fact are necessarily true. We can imagine, without contradiction, the contrary of every matter of fact - there is no necessity. The sun will not always rise; the fastest speed known will probably not be the speed of light; - and these statements are not nor do they imply contradictions. All we can say - in principle - is that our knowledge and understanding up to this moment is based on experience and is not a necessary given known a priori and that in the future our experience and understanding may in fact change (and no doubt inferring from past experiences - will do). This is the great humility of good science and inductive arguments.

And thirdly, if we ask - what caused the first cause - we must look at what we are saying. If we imagine that this cause is of some fintite duration and that this cause contains within it a change, then only its last temporal part plays a role in the cause. But if that cause is of some finite duration, involving no effect within itself, then surely, by the very principle of cause and effect, no such thing could ever be found.

Again, if conceived as some fintite duration, it seems odd to accept that some given cause after existing for some time should suddenly 'decide' to explode into effect when it might as well have done at some earlier time or have gone on indefintely without producing an effect. Moreover, all this talk of duration and finite and change and cause and effect is taking place within a framework of 'time', take that time away and what are we to say of such principles?

As we can see, the term cause and effect is often vague and confused and perhaps the very principle of say, searching for Aristotle's prime mover, or the theologian's deity, some empirically grounded first cause, or even the very notion of 'what caused the big bang', are themselves conceptual errors.

At the moment our physics can describe events right down to about 10-43 of a second after the big bang and there is no necessary reason why it can't chisel away at that miniscule digit and reveal a something other beyond our wildest imaginations and no doubt, if lacking our human, all too human ontological understandings of being and time will probably be - but who knows - qualitatively (as oppossed to purely mathematical) incomprehensible.

[Rihard]

Does time really exist though? .. isn't this just an invention of the mind of man to control the masses.. Isn't everything with motion a time piece?, Think about it... If time and space are locked into a single continuum and space is not just expanding but is also accelerating then this must be true, that time must be going faster as well..And maybe the fallacy that people are living longer isn't true, We are living the same life period but because time is accelerating it gives the appearance we are living longer?..

I personally believe that time is just a virtual catalogue of events made up by human brains to help them keep track of changes around them and their own actions .

[Cath]

We are starting to come up against a few barriers that science is going to find very hard to explain/describe, if not impossible. What to do about that is going to be a problem for us - depending on what direction the human race wants to follow that is.

[JulianO]

I invoke Clarke's 1st law.

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  

I think it applies not just to elderly scientists too

[Cath]

I invoke Clarke's 1st law.

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  

I think it applies not just to elderly scientists too

It is impossible for something to be impossible though?

[Tiki]

True, but there are observations which strike me as potentially explicable if we allow some quantum events to be standing outside the time that we see. Double slit, entangled photons, etc.

Olly

Any extra detail appreciated.

[symesie04]

Any extra detail appreciated.

Double slit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Quantum entaglement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

[Bwfcrus]

i have just come across this post and i thought i would share this excellent read http://luxperci.com/five-part-series-time/

i found it very interesting.

quick question, if a proton is traveling at the speed of light, say from a star 1 million light years away, then how does time have an affect on the proton?

doesnt time pass slower as things approach the speed of light?

then why to we still see the star as it was 1 million years ago?

if time has passed slower for the proton.......blah my head hurts can someone explain, its probably a stupid question

[JulianO]

A proton can't travel at the speed of light, only close to it. For a proton travelling that fast, yes time is slowed down. You can't really tell this for a proton, but you can for other particles. Muon's for instance decay at a certain rate, a fairly short half life. However if you get them travelling very close to the speed of light, they take longer to decay on average, so their internal clocks (the half life in this cae) is affected by their speed.

Photons travel at the speed of light (only) and time sort of stands still for them, not that we can tell. The light from the star is carried by these photons, and they take a million years to arrive at us, so we see the star as it was a million years ago. Quite what the photon thinks is happening in the meantime is probably anyones guess, but it hands over it's message that the star emitted light of a certain type a million years ago.

[Bwfcrus]

sorry i was actually talking about the photons . i understand what u mean when u say we can tell time passes slower for other particles because of an event(of the particle) that we can measure by time, but my small brain cannot seem to grasp why we as an observer, cannot tell that the clock on the photon isnt time at 1 million light years. its like the photon turning up and saying "hi i have travelled 1 million light years to get here, but i only left 1 thousand years ago". is the explanation based on how the photon(and us) see time?

[ollypenrice]

sorry i was actually talking about the photons . i understand what u mean when u say we can tell time passes slower for other particles because of an event(of the particle) that we can measure by time, but my small brain cannot seem to grasp why we as an observer, cannot tell that the clock on the photon isnt time at 1 million light years. its like the photon turning up and saying "hi i have travelled 1 million light years to get here, but i only left 1 thousand years ago". is the explanation based on how the photon(and us) see time?

There are particles created by collisions in the upper atmosphere which we know decay too fast to survive the jouney to the surface of the Earth where we collect them. But they do survive long enough. How? Because time, for them, is slowed by the high speed at which they are travelling. We say they don't have time to get to us. They say they do. They are right.

Olly

[Qualia]

If physical entities are extended in spacetime, could that mean that extension in time is analogous to extension in space?

My telescope, for example, can be spatially extended in virtue of having some spatial parts over-here s₁ and other spatial parts over-there s₂. So are physical entities in spacetime necessarily like this in virtue of temporal extension? Can my telescope in spacetime be extended from time t₁ to time t₂ in virtue of having different temporal parts at the given different times? Or does the telescope somehow extend itself in time from t₁ to t₂ and be wholly present at each of those times?

Putting this in practical form, just as my telescope as a wholly-present-entity can be spatially extended from the inside of my room (the viewing end) to the outside of the window (the lense end), can my telescope today and my telescope yesterday be considered mere temporal parts of the object and not in either case the whole temporal object and that the relation between telescope-today and telescope-yesterday is just like the relation between the two spatial parts of my telescope - different parts of a bigger whole?

In spacetime, then, how disimilar is time to space?

[ollypenrice]

That's a very good question. Continuity through time. I'd never thought about it like that.

Olly

[Vince1963]

I Think i see what your saying here Qualia. To extend on that, Edwin Hubble states that the further away an object is in space the faster it is moving away from us, So then does this mean that time is travelling faster or is it our prospective here on Earth?,. Please correct me if i'm getting the wrong end of the stick.

[Andymac79]

How about this. Everything travels at light speed but that speed is divided between the time dimension and the space dimensions, so a photon, say, travels at light speed through space so it doesnt travel at all through time. Something that is motionless in space (which for me is not possible) will travel at light speed through time.

So if I drive my car at 100mph the remainder of the 670, 616, 529mph are still there, just in the time dimension...?

[Tiki]

In spacetime, then, how disimilar is time to space?

It depends on the underlying geometry.

eg. In a universe containing only one dimension and particles that all move with the same uniform velocity then by a well chosen scale-factor the time and space coordinates would be the same.

In our Universe the time and space coordinates are pretty dissimilar.

[sologuitarist61]

Goodness - that is all I need at this time of the evening to suddenly come across the face of Prof Brian Cox - please put a warning up first