Defiant Heretic

But time isn't the thing that has changed. The way an atomic reaction works (I think) is:

• A neutron is fired at a stable U-235 atom
• The added neutron creates an unstable U-236 isotope
• The U-236 isotope 'splits' into two different atoms: Barium and Krypton
• Some neutrons are shot free of this reaction
• They impact other U-235 atoms and continue the chain reaction

So when an atomic clock is subjected to high gravity, speed, etc., the gravity or inertia would affect the speed of the neutrons just a little.
This would create the discrepancy between clocks.
Time wasn't altered. Matter was.

dostf

Black Moses:

Enjoyed reading parts of your posts....

In my opinion....
i agree with you time does not exist...but will qualify this statement...
the idea of time is a human one based on his or her own idea of their perceived existance. We can exist "more" or "less" depending on what is in our mind at any moment..
Hence we feel the "passing of time" differently in different situations...
Example.. sitting across from the one you love and looking in their eyes... Do you notice "time passing"? or for that matter where you are?
The less "what you define as YOU exists" the less all else exists also..including "time".
It all relates back to the human being as i think you might agree...

Answerer

Humans experience 'time' mainly because of their memory, try and think of what 'time' means to a piece of rock.

RogerLeeCooke

Once again that slippery word "exists" arises to haunt me. I've always taken a radical commonsense view about this concept, especially in regard to geometry. Time is, as far as I'm concerned, a (local) *relation* ordering events according to "earlier" and "later". It should not be thought of as a substantial thing, and its existence is of the same order as that of a line drawn on a blackboard. The particles of chalk may be said to exist in a substantial sense, but the line doesn't exist in that sense. You can rephrase what you mean when you say the line exists without mentioning existence by saying that the particles have a certain relationship to one another. However, doing so would be very peculiar and wordy. Geometry is all like that. It is convenient to think of the points of a line or a space as "existing," but when geometry is applied to the real world, there is no way of identifying a specific point except in relation to observable *objects*. You need at least three observable and noncollinear objects to give a coordinate system in a plane, after which you can use the mathematical cross product to get a third dimension. Newton, of course, believed in absolute space and time. He believed that God assigns coordinates to points of empty space and (I infer) could have done so even if no matter existed at all. To me, this view is utter nonsense. Space itself is not a thing, and geometry is merely a convenient way of thinking about relations among real things.

The same is true about numbers. Gauss proved the fundamental theorem of algebra because he thought it important to prove that solutions of algebraic equations "exist." Before him, mathematicians had been striving to find formulas for solving the equations, and they considered that finding a formula for the solution was adequate proof of its existence. I think they were right and Gauss was wrong, although of course his proof was very valuable.

RogerLeeCooke

Excellent point. I've always been intrigued by the fact that the nineteenth-century mathematical physicists began regarding time as a complex variable rather than a real variable. (That would make it two-dimensional.) They did this for mathematical reasons, so that they could use the theory of analytic functions of a complex variable. But I've searched the literature high and low and can't find any good *physical* reason among all their writing for interpreting the non-real component of time.

Theli

Change. That's what time means to a rock.

Liquidrage

Nothing means anything to a piece of rock.

There is no apparent mechanism in a rock that would allow it to give meaning to anything.

A rock in nothing but a collection of the most fundamental pieces that could be.
Therefor it would be safe to conclude that a rock does not experience spacetime.

Mr. Sammi

LiquidRage,

in your esteemed understanding, would you go as far as stating that a rock is part of the spacetime experience?

In other words rocks enjoy the benefits of time.

Sammi Na Boodie ()

[ August 07, 2002: Message edited by: Mr. Sammi ]</p>

Liquidrage

Semantics aside, I would say that a rock is a part of our perception (or experience) of spacetime.

The rock itself experiences nothing. No dimensions at all.

Answerer

Well, how can a rock experience change when it can't even remember what it is doing one second ago.