Can We Escape from Time?
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Can We Escape from Time?
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Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#2Not at the moment.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#3"What would be good, though, would be for someone to call us back when the thinking leads to something, anything, that we can see or feel or sense or even understand—because all this astonishingly brilliant thought and science and learning and history, all these amazing stories, as far as I can tell, have no consequences at all. Our commonsense subjective understanding of time is as telling, as tyrannical, as it ever was. A century-plus of fervent speculation and analysis of time and time travel have led to exactly no outcomes. We are as stuck in the present, as irrevocably exiled from both past and future, as ever."
Einstein's time dilation has practical consequences: aside from being able to observe the slowdown in atomic clocks taken up in airplanes and the many consequences in astronomy, we also have GPS, which would not work without taking relativity into account. If GPS doesn't count as a 'consequence' or 'outcome' due to a non-traditional understanding of time, nothing does!
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#4"What would be good, though, would be for someone to call us back when the thinking leads to something, anything, that we can see or feel or sense or even understand—because all this astonishingly brilliant thought and science and learning and history, all these amazing stories, as far as I can tell, have no consequences at all. Our commonsense subjective understanding of time is as telling, as tyrannical, as it ever…
This is a relatively common misconception. The location calculation in GPS is independent of any time dilation between the GPS receiver and the satellites (as long as the satellites have roughly equal dilation), because the receiver clock is derived from the satellites' signals. This is also the reason why you need at least four satellites for a 3D fix, and three for a 2D fix - you are always deriving an additional unknown variable, time. (And this is also the reason why a GPS time receiver works with only one satellite: the position is locked when they are set up, after that they can work with 1+ satellites. More satellites will reduce errors, though.)
The time dilation is therefore only compensated so that you can use a GPS receiver as a very accurate, absolute clock.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#5"'There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it,' says the Traveller. That turned out, amazingly and counterintuitively, to be true. 'In surprisingly short order this notion would become part of the orthodoxy of theoretical physics,' says Gleick."
What? Spacetime does contain four dimensions, but the whole reason that time travel is fiction, rather than fact, is because the time dimension is different from the space dimensions.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#6"What would be good, though, would be for someone to call us back when the thinking leads to something, anything, that we can see or feel or sense or even understand—because all this astonishingly brilliant thought and science and learning and history, all these amazing stories, as far as I can tell, have no consequences at all. Our commonsense subjective understanding of time is as telling, as tyrannical, as it ever…
This is a relatively common misconception. The location calculation in GPS is independent of any time dilation between the GPS receiver and the satellites (as long as the satellites have roughly equal dilation), because the receiver clock is derived from the satellites' signals. This is also the reason why you need at least four satellites for a 3D fix, and three for a 2D fix - you are always deriving an additional u…
Technically the fourth variable that a receiver solves for is the clock error in the receiver, not the actual time (though that then follows easily enough). The system of equations is only solvable because it is assumed that the clock error of the satellietes relative to each other is zero. I'm not convinced though that time dilation is the same for all the satellites, since they are not all in the same orbit.
Since the system works by determining signal delay between the satellite and the receiver and the signals move at (rougly) the speed of light, even an nanosecond error in time is already a 30 cm error in position. According to [0] the clock drift due to relativistic effects would be over 45000 nanoseconds per day. So keeping the clocks synchronized for all the satellites is crucial and relativistic corrections are super important for accurate positioning.
[0]: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#7Picture Time as the surface of a pond.
Events are a stone being dropped into or skipped along the surface of that pond. The waves produced by the event are viewable from all angles. The actual event -the stone drop- occurs only once. The event is immutable, even though the ripples persist and are measurable.
We may eventually be able to view the ripples in more detail, and see past or future events. The events themselves though, are immutable. They've already occurred or have not occurred yet. The stone does not change. The interaction between stone and surface does not change. What changes is our ability to decipher data from that event, not the event itself.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#8Sure. Time is a mere environmentaly conditioned mental conception. No such phenomena exist. Only environmental and social conditioning. It could only be derived by an intelligent observer. No observer - no time. For a photon there is no time.
BTW, conversation laws are hinting to an illusory nature of time. Change of compound structures do exist and it is in everything we are able to observe. But the whole is unchanged, no matter what fancy theories or simulations would say.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#9Sure. Time is a mere environmentaly conditioned mental conception. No such phenomena exist. Only environmental and social conditioning. It could only be derived by an intelligent observer. No observer - no time. For a photon there is no time. BTW, conversation laws are hinting to an illusory nature of time. Change of compound structures do exist and it is in everything we are able to observe. But the whole is unchang…
But for a photon, it doesn't experience time for the reason that it travels at the speed of light. It is a slightly different phenomenon.
Re: Can We Escape from Time?
#10Picture Time as the surface of a pond. Events are a stone being dropped into or skipped along the surface of that pond. The waves produced by the event are viewable from all angles. The actual event -the stone drop- occurs only once. The event is immutable, even though the ripples persist and are measurable. We may eventually be able to view the ripples in more detail, and see past or future events. The events themse…
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