> Does Time Exist?
Only relative to a given frame of reference.
Does Time Exist?
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Does Time Exist?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
does entropy always increase? are there systems or forms of matter that literally cheat entropy?
Any system can cheat entropy as long as it's not a closed system, by decreasing locally but increasing it globally. Life is a good example.
life and information are good examples, yes.
i sometimes wonder if our understanding of physics is somewhat limited to what we can see/observe/measure (include instruments here) and wonder if the laws of physics as we perceive them are only a set of laws that are not necessarily universal and apply anywhere where matter exists (that a long way of saying that maybe entropy comes with only one set of laws of physics that just so happens to be the ones that we are experiencing right now)
Re: Does Time Exist?
#63what if time is caused by movement? relative time, since we already know spacetime to be an entity
Re: Does Time Exist?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was making a reference the next line in the book: "Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."
(How embarrassing.)
Eh, it's one thing to know a highly memorable quote. It's another to remember the following line.
I've listened to the audiobooks of that series so many times.
Tangent, they got Simon Jones to read for book 6. which i thought was a mistake. He played Arthur in he radio dramas. It made the audiobook hard to follow because every character sounded like Authur.
Re: Does Time Exist?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
(How embarrassing.)
Eh, it's one thing to know a highly memorable quote. It's another to remember the following line. I've listened to the audiobooks of that series so many times. Tangent, they got Simon Jones to read for book 6. which i thought was a mistake. He played Arthur in he radio dramas. It made the audiobook hard to follow because every character sounded like Authur.
Obviously no time to find another reader.
Re: Does Time Exist?
#66[deleted]
Re: Does Time Exist?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can flip that around and say that a distance is just the movement of something over a measured time. By your original argument, distance doesn't exist.
Given distance, velocity and time; choose any two as physical and the third will be emergent. Choose according to the view you want to explore.
The fact that the third is emergent seems to me like more evidence that it is real, rather than the opposite
Re: Does Time Exist?
#68Time is the direction in which entropy always increases. It's the most real thing there is.
Or at least tends to increase. Entropy can always spontaneously decrease, or can simply not increase for a moment. This was actually discussed a week ago! [1] As discussed in those comments, entropy isn't well-formulated outside of equilibrium states, and is subjective: it is a function of an observer's knowledge of the system (particularly microstates). I'd say time is very real, and an inescapable part of experienc…
In my—undergraduate, not-very-specialist—days of being taught something or other about entropy now and then, I felt like we were being told "This state is special, so the entropy is low, and then it probably ends up in one of these other states, and none of them are special, so the entropy has increased”, and it would seem to me that we could appreciate all of the states as equally special if we were big-brained enough. Maybe like the integers being Ramanujan’s personal friends.
Re: Does Time Exist?
#69I’ve been wondering a lot lately if it’s possible that time is felt differently (I guess moves ) for us on an individual level.
Time is felt differently at different points in our life, even within an individual’s experience. When you pay more attention to the passage of time itself, it appears to elapse more slowly. When you don’t pay attention, it appears to elapse more quickly.
Yes, I would absolutely accept that we all perceive time at different rates, but where we externally synchronize with measured “seconds”, we don’t have any way to communicate that my “second” may subjectively feel longer than your “second”. Similar to how we can’t really describe what “red” looks like to someone else, without using the word “red”.
Re: Does Time Exist?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long been skeptical of this explanation. Later school ages (junior high and high school) were probably the most monotonous and regimented part of my life, period—I've certainly never experienced that much concentrated, intense boredom without any way to do anything about it—yet subjective time had only barely sped up from elementary school. It should then have slowed way down in college, but it didn't. It should…
I’m less interested in how long it feels in my memories, and more in how long it feels while I’m living it. If it makes any sense, the question is how to cram as much—consciousness, I guess?—as possible, into however many decades I get.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? So many people are focused on every other moment besides “now”. Memories build from our past, and they’re constantly appearing in our minds based on various stimuli. Moreover, society is structured in such a way that people are constantly focused on the future. It’s very difficult to actively live “in the now” and focus on the actual experience of simply existing.
That’s really the biggest tragedy of modern human existence, many people never get to see the true beauty of living in the now, they only get to see it from the “bad” perspective, when their negative emotions become overwhelming and time seems to slow down to a standstill.
Normalize living in the now. Normalize the idea that our “purpose” on this Earth is simply to exist, and that “purpose” can be the most important of all possible purposes.
To quote the ever-wise Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”