Totalitarianist

If you do not believe in God you are denying every axiom, every bit of knowledge you've ever accumulated. Wrangling with the 'god' idea is almost as irrational as believing. God does exist, just not in the conventional sense. Atheists, like myself, just call it a different name. God is omnipotent and omnirpesent. In Christian mytholoy, as you all know, God is the creator. 'God' can be defined as 'a powerful ruler'. By that defination, is it not logical to consider 'God' the axiomatic laws that govern everything (which I will call Potestas)? However, at the same time, a 'creator' cannot exist. It goes against the law of consevation of energy: energy cannot be created or destroyed. Therefore I am inclined to believe that time itself does not exist. Everything has always been, however, the human mind percieves everything in sequences. 'Time', if you want to call it that, is just teleportation. But how can that be?

Now, let's suppose time does exist.
A dog travels from point A to point B. This is a finite distance, correct? It's also done in a finite amount of time. Now let's split this distance in half. Okay, now it's half the size it was before. Let's further halve it. Again, again, again. Ah, now there's only two atoms left of distance. Let's split this in half. Now we realize that we'll be halving distances forever. But that's impossible! How could a dog travel a finite distance, in a finite amound of time, that can be split in half an infinite amount of times? What about if we split the amount of time it takes for the dog to travel from point A to point B? This, too, can be halved an infinite amount of times. But that's impossible... Unless there is a smallest unit... But that would mean fluint motion is also impossible. The smallest unit will travel one unit at a time. Hence motion is teleportation, and time is motion. The smallest unit time elapsed is just the individual teleportations needed for motion. This is why the human mind percieves things in sequences.

Mageth

Congratulations, you've rediscovered Zeno's Paradox.

Experience shows us that the dog can and does reach point B. Mathematics shows us that teleportation is not necessary to explain this "paradox."

Infinite series can be mathematically shown to converge. See:

<a href="http://pirate.shu.edu/projects/reals/numser/series.html" target="_blank">Zeno's Paradox and the Convergence of Infinite Series</a>.

Indifference

I've heard this before, but it still intrigues me.

The smallest unit of time we can, so far, measure is something like (and I'm completely guessing) 10^-10th second. But who's to say we won't find a smallest segment of which we cannot 'halve'.

The idea that time can be segments, rather than fluid, and that we wouldn't notice, is not impossible. For example movies are merely a strip of pictures shown one after another (something like 25 per second). The reason we see a 'motion' picture is that our brain cannot process information that fast. So if time seems like motion to us, it COULD merely be one stepping stone after another rapidly enough for us not to notice.

Now, I'm not sure I believe this, but it is very interesting. I think I will suspend my belief untill it is proven.

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Indifference ]</p>

Bill

You are off by a few orders of magnitude. I don't know what the real lower limit of time measurement is, but I do know that a one gigahertz clock is one pulse every 10^-9th second (one nanosecond per pulse), and it hasn't been hard to measure nanoseconds for a long time. One terahertz is a picosecond (10^-12) per pulse, and I've read papers about measurements of electronic phenomena in femtoseconds (10^-15). Physics labs measure stuff far more accurately than that when they are looking at decay products of nuclear collisions.

The theoretical boundary for time measurement is defined by the Planck Constant, and it is (I think) somewhere around 10^-45 seconds. But as things sit right now, we can't measure anything with anywhere near that degree of precision.

=====

But all that aside, I do see where you are coming from here, as you do approach the basic idea of one great debate in the realm of quantum mechanics: is there a minimum sized "quanta" of time: Well, it hasn't been proven, but it HAS been formally conjectured, as one way out of the hole dug by quantum mechanics. You see, if there really was some sort of minimum quanta of time, we could use that to avoid many of the small-scale infinities that make quantum mechanics seem so silly.

But so far, no physicist to consider that issue carefully has been able to devise any sort of empirical scheme for determining whether or not time is quantized. Until they can test that conjecture, it will remain just that: a conjecture.

== Bill

Indifference

Can you explain, in fairly simple terms, the Planck Constant? What the basis is for such a theory?

Time is probably my favorite subject, but as of now my knowledge of it is minimal. Any help would be appreciated.

Also, on a side note, have there been conjectures on the smallest portion of matter? As far as I know we've gotten to the quark, and possibly one size smaller. From what I can see, there are two possibilities:

1. There exists a smallest building block of matter.
2. All building blocks can be divided into smaller building blocks.

The possibility (if you can call it that) of #2 is fascinating. So far, every time it seems that we've discovered the smallest particle possible, we find another. But if matter can be divided into smaller and smaller building blocks all the way to infinity, I am perplexed... "are we made up of infinite something, or infinite nothing?" (A friend of mine I need give credit to for that remark)

thanks.

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Indifference ]</p>

Ender

I think the Planck limit is the length of a photon particle. But don't take my word for it- do a google search, given that my science knowledge is as good as my ability to be diplomatic.

~WiGGiN~

Coljac

Planck's constant, 6.2x10^-34 Js, was derived by Plank in an attempt to explain black-body radiation (the spectrum of energy given off by a hot object), and sort of ushered in the quantum revolution in physics, the notion that things such as energy come in discrete lumps.

Time and space, i.e. spacetime, may indeed be quantized as well (that is, composed of indivisble segments). This is known as the Planck scale - the Planck length being about 10^-35m and the Planck time being about 10^-45s. The experimental evidence is sketchy at best - the arguments for Planck time seem to often come down to the notion that any smaller increment of time is meaningless - but there is interesting theory to back up this notion. Attempts to combine the physical realms of general relativity and quantum mechanics, i.e. a quantum theory of gravity, lead one to the conclusion that space is indeed quantized. I can't/won't go into the details (my knowledge of this area is terrible) but one finds that it's necessary to hypothesize quantized space to explain why the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, or other situations where the information inside a region is proportional to an area. If there's a finite amount of information behind a unit area of surface, then there must be a finite number of units of area in the first place. Odd.

Anyway, all this goes to show that the universe is so much more remarkable and interesting than the rather pedestrian fishtank a theistic worldview implies.

Coljac

Bill

Not quite. <a href="http://www.physics.reading.ac.uk/units/flap/glossary/pp/plnkcnst.htm" target="_blank">This university site</a> states it as 6.6262 x 10^-34 J s (close, but the 2 you state after the decimal point is clearly wrong......).

=====

I found some introductory material on Planck's Constant on the page about <a href="http://www.carthage.edu/departments/physics/matia.htm" target="_blank">Measuring Planck’s Constant with LEDs</a>, and for the most basic question, you may wish to read <a href="http://www.carthage.edu/departments/physics/sld003.htm" target="_blank">Why is Planck's Constant Important?</a> The answer is that Planck's constant defines a relationship between the frequency of the electromagnetic energy and the amount of energy carried within one photon (or one quanta of electromagnetic energy). In fact, the energy of the photon is directly proportional to the frequency, with the slope of the curve representing the fixed value of Planck's Constant.

The other Planck-type units of measurement (the Planck scale of distance, etc.) are derivitives of this same idea using the equations of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, if Quantum Mechanics is ever proven to be wrong (quite unlikely at this point in time), the Planck-related measurements would evaporate in importance.

== Bill

[ May 03, 2002: Message edited by: Bill ]</p>

zorq

We don't know if time is quantized, but we do know that it is relative. Just as we are able to verify that the motion picture is composed of individual frames by slowing down the rate at which they are shown, we should be able to do the same thing with time.
This is my proposed scheme for determining weather or not time is quantized.
Given a sufficiently small quantity of matter We are able to accelerate this matter in laboratory conditions to speeds close to that of light. If a particle is accelereated to such a speed, then time for it slows down compared to standard time.
The setup for this experiment is fairly easy.
Place such an accelerated particle in a circular track. At the center of the circular track place a device capable of monitoring the status of the particle (high definition camera set to follow the position of the particle by spinning at a high speed or some such thing) Then because the length of the circumference of the track is much larger than the circumference of the spinning measurement device, the measurement device would not need to spin nearly as fast as the particle, thus creating a measurable "time gradient." Now if time is quantized, Our measurement device should be able to detect that the movement of the accelerated particle starts to become jittery, just as the movie does when the frames per second is reduced.
Would this work?

AdamWho

Time is quatatized at plank scales. The heisenberg uncertainty pricipal says 2 things:

h = planks constant, h bar
dE = uncertainty in Energy
dt = uncertainty in time

dE*dt &lt;= h

Since energy is quatatized at small scales then so is time. Momentum and position have the same relation.

It is not a philosophical question.