atrahasis

Thank You scumble? At least i have somebody who looks at things the way i do.

Why is it that a boring 1 hour lecture seems to take 3 hours?

While sitting on a cute girl for 5 hours seems to take 3 minutes. It is all in our perception.!

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: Black Moses ]</p>

Liquidrage

The End of Time is without a doubt the hardest read I've had so far in my laymans physics career.

I sought the book out because I had always believed time was nothing more then a man made description.

I believe in order to discuss "time vs no time" one needs to put forth Julian's Time Capsules or "now".
Basically, in his views (and many agree) the universe has a frame rate. There is a smallest event that can happen. This occurs at the Planck time.

Whether time exists or not is semantical. Like the post above says "does a dozen exist?"

What Barbour really put forth was the framerate/clockwork universe.

Edit:The typo king strikes again

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: Liquidrage ]</p>

Bill

T=0 is the conventional way of referring to the first moment of the "Big Bang." Because it is conventional, you can't argue against it without arguing to change a previously agreed convention. At this juncture, I won't bother to respond to the suggestion that the convention be changed.

I am not a scientist. I have neither the knowledge nor training to be a scientist. I am an ordinary person who takes an interest in philosophy. Science is a profession. My profession is telecommunications engineering, which is a bad field to be in these days if you want to be keeping your job. Unfortunately, at my age, it is way too late to go back to school and try to get a degree in some other (more valueable) field.

From my perspective, science is, in fact, a "domain out there" where scientists work (hard) to produce answers to questions. If you offered me two answers to some particular question, one from a qualified scientist and another from a bum on the street, which one do you think I would value the most?

I don't mean to imply that the "domain out there" which contains "science" is totally disconnected from the reality of human existence. Far from it, since science is nothing more than the collection of scientists who are working their profession within the agreed rule-set. All scientists are also part of the community of humans, and thus everything scientific naturally links back to the desires and interests of humanity at large.

But I do mean to challenge the idea that all people are naturally qualified to be scientists. That is an absurd idea! And yet, you seem to imply that this is true. Not so! You need to adopt a particular creed in order to be a true scientist. Most of us refuse to adopt that particular creed. We are too set within our own comfortable worldviews to adopt the proper air of objectivity required of the true scientist.

== Bill

excreationist

About Julian Barbour's theory - it is about a theoretical entity called <a href="http://www.platonia.com/" target="_blank">Platonia</a>. I read about it in a New Scientist article. I think it basically is about an entity that describes the state of the universe at various points in time in all of the possible histories. Perhaps it assumes that "time" progresses in discrete intervals, otherwise there would be in infinite amount of branching, even within a tiny time interval.
One of the good things about the theory is that if the evolution of life is extremely unlikely, it makes it much more likely since it involves *every* possible histories. Perhaps in most histories, life never happened.
I don't know what is supposed to happened in the theory near the end of the universe though... there would be a problem if the universe never ceased to exist in any of the possible histories since the points on Platonia would be infinite. Even if the universe collapsed in all of the histories, it doesn't really explain why the tree would end there... maybe it could connect back onto the start of the tree (the initial big bang)...

Anyway, it is one of the only quantum physics theories that I kind of understand... but perhaps there are many problems with it... I don't really understand how a static entity can house processes and activity.

Ierrellus

Black Moses,

No fallacy arrives from my inclusion of Heraclitus' notion of change with these other relativistic concepts. The fallacy becomes apparent when you make no distinction between motion and change by insisting that experential time must somehow be a condition of mechanical time. You define experential time by personal mood, then expect mood to comply with impersonal gradiants of duration.

Ierrellus
PAX

atrahasis

Originally posted by IntenSity:
Time is a human concept, just like civilization and morality.
Good,Time is a human concept Thats the whole idea anyway.

Time is a tool for measuring change.
"30 years ago, Bryce Dewitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's thoery of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole universe. Put into the equation, a configuration of the universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time."
From this Time is not a tool for measuring change.


When there is no one to count the time, then time ceases to exist.
If by "no one" you mean no human being, then this premise will fail when we look at the Big bang which says that life was only possible on earth after a couple of billions of years since the singularity epoch. There was "no one" to count time between the singularity epoch and when life started. If it exists at all!


In a world where there is no change (ie no entropy), time stands still.
Substitute the word 'world' with 'universe'. Before singularity, everything was still, at least according to the big bang, yet something changed i.e Everything started to exist. If there was no change, nothing would be there. what caused the initial change from nothingness to a big bag which in turn yielded time[if it exists at all] among others?

Does a dozen exist?
Yes! a dozen exists with or without Time!

--Thanks--

Ted Hoffman

"30 years ago, Bryce Dewitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's thoery of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole universe. Put into the equation, a configuration of the universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time."
From this Time is not a tool for measuring change.
Its invalid to use an equation to discount actual reality. By your own admission, the equation was riddled with irregularities.

An equation is only valid if it conforms with reality. Passing the reality is the ultimate test.
An equation cant prove that reality is wrong.
If by "no one" you mean no human being, then this premise will fail when we look at the Big bang which says that life was only possible on earth after a couple of billions of years since the singularity epoch. There was "no one" to count time between the singularity epoch and when life started. If it exists at all!
You are begging the question. This is what you are saying:
1. The big bang says that life was only possible on earth after a couple of billions of years since the singularity epoch.
2. Time requires someone to count it
3. Therefore there was no time for billions of years between the singularity epoch and when life began.

Is this even coherent?

You can misapply my argument and contradict yourself at leisure, I will not interfere.

Substitute the word 'world' with 'universe'. Before singularity, everything was still, at least according to the big bang, yet something changed i.e Everything started to exist. If there was no change, nothing would be there. what caused the initial change from nothingness to a big bag which in turn yielded time[if it exists at all] among others?
This question is not relevant to this discussion. Start another thread and I will be glad to answer.

Yes! a dozen exists with or without Time!
Did I ask whether a dozen exists with or without time?

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: IntenSity ]</p>

Answerer

Well, I, personally, like to think of the universe as a super thermo-marcostate of constant changes without any past or future. However, we all know that in physics, we can't be certain about anything so it is best to be open-minded.
Apparently, if time travel is possible, then time must exist and so, in the opposite case, in which time was found not to have no existence that makes time travel impossible. However, if time travel is found to be impossible first, our conclusions will be far more harder to determine. Nevertheless, I can think of this as the only or most practical way to determine whether time exists or not.
It is interesting to note that if time travel is possible, why aren't we visited by time travellers from the future? A tough question I guess and maybe a question we will never know.

<img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: Answerer ]</p>

atrahasis

[QUOTE]Originally posted by IntenSity:
Its invalid to use an equation to discount actual reality. By your own admission, the equation was riddled with irregularities.

An equation is only valid if it conforms with reality. Passing the reality is the ultimate test.
An equation cant prove that reality is wrong.
Physicist have accepted this, You are the first physicist to deny it!!!

You are begging the question. This is what you are saying:
1. The big bang says that life was only possible on earth after a couple of billions of years since the singularity epoch.
2. Time requires someone to count it
3. Therefore there was no time for billions of years between the singularity epoch and when life began.
Whether i begged the question or not. Still there was a certain period when there was "no one" to count time. Yet change occured.

Is this even coherent?
Yes it is! If you can make up the premises and conclusion. Im sure you could!

You can misapply my argument and contradict yourself at leisure, I will not interfere.
It all depends on and how i misapplied your argument

Did I ask whether a dozen exists with or without time?
Ok, then a dozen exists!period!

--Thanks again---

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: Black Moses ]</p>

Bill

OK, I have heard of this idea, although I didn't associate this idea with Barber's name.

Since quantum mechanics proposes a discrete minimum entity (one quanta) for both matter and energy, I suppose it is a natural intuition to advance the hypothesis that time also has a discrete minimum "quanta" (the "Planck time" for lack of a better definition).

The problem for me with this idea is the fact that it forces otherwise naturally flowing concepts to be broken up into discrete events. A spaceship traveling from here to the Moon does not flow smoothly through space but rather makes a long series of discrete "jumps" from spot to spot along the way, with the relationship between the "frame rate" and the distance traveled producing the velocity (rate of travel).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Barber's idea also call for space to exist in discrete quanta? If the Planck time (about 10**-43 seconds) is the minimum quanta of time, then the Planck length (about 1.6 times 10**-35 meters) would be the minimum distance. The minimum velocity for movement would then be to move one Planck length for each Planck time. The maximum velocity is the speed of light (c = 299,792,458 meters per second), which corresponds to a motion of somewhere between one and two Planck lengths per Planck time. This seems to fly in the face of logic because (by definition) we cannot move two Planck units in a single Planck time (that would be faster than the speed of light), but if we move only one Planck unit in one Planck time, that is as slow as we can go, and yet it is about 53% of the speed of light. If you propose that different velocities are achieved by moving one Planck length for multiple Planck times, then we get even more absurd situations to deal with.

So, we seemingly cannot have both the Planck Length and the Planck time as minimum discrete quantas of space and time. And yet, Einstein's theory of relativity treated units of space and time as equivalent. So, either Einstein's treatment of space and time dimensions was wrong or Barber's theory has to be wrong.

For all its elegance, I don't see the "framerate universe" as being a viable concept for describing reality. We need a continuum of possible distances on the length scale in order for the observed reality to be explainable. And I, for one, do not believe that Einstein's treatment of the time scale as being equivalent to the distance scale to be so wrong as to allow for Barber's explanation to be correct.

Of course, I'm no expert on this topic. But if one of you experts can explain this to me in some sort of pattern of understandable concepts, then I might at least entertain Barber's idea a bit further.

== Bill