No such thing as time - Question about Albert Einstein - Page 2

Like you OP, I am open minded enough to listen to your teachers argument that there is no such thing as time, but let the atomic clock go out on your teachers flight, train, ship, satellite GPS, for a few hours. I bet your teacher will believe in time very quickly.

As far as the scientific education I have been getting from reading this thread, very interesting and thought provoking. Very good thread you have started.

The earliest philosopher who said time did not exist (!!!that i know of!!!) is St. Augustine. (I'm not some kind of scholar so... take this information w/ caution. My summary is hazardous towards the genius of St. Augustine. Btw. I'm not religious at all. I just have to do a big paper on him.)

It's AMAZING! 16 centuries ago?!

There was a problem w/ genesis. If taken literally, it didn't make sense because God was creating in time.... something like that. Also, how can something come from nothing? How can time be... if time is not created.

The idea is w/ the "word" of god... the universe was created. God's "word" is above ours. Our rhetoric comes in order/sequence. God's word is infinite and unending and all at once.

God exists outside of what we think of as "time".

How can things exist + time exist? ---- it gets length but here is *MY SUMMARY* for the end part.

The future does not exist. We don't really get to the future since we are always in the present. The past does not exist. We are not in the past. We can not touch the past. Memory is what we have. The only thing we are "in" is the present and even that keeps shifting. Time does not truly exist. It is an illusion.

The problem that he had w/ this is that time can be measured. His answer to this was unclear. Something about our memory stuff or whatnot. Still... 1600 years ago.

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." ~Albert Einstein

Here are the Radio Lab podcasts I referred to earlier. They are VERY worth listening to, especially if you download them and listen to them on your commute or whenever you have an hour to kill:

Time:

WNYC - Radiolab: Time (February 25, 2005)

Beyond Time:

WNYC - Radiolab: Beyond Time (July 22, 2007)

The (Multi)Universe(s):

WNYC - Radiolab » The (Multi) Universe(s)

i'm definitely going to give the Brian Greene stuff a listen (and probably the others too)... thanks for the links!

As for the finite vs. infinite universe, i see what you're saying about matter vs. size. but regardless, it is still expanding... therefore there is an arrow of time that can be measured in universal terms.

the whole multiverse thing is an interesting exercise in theoretical physics, and i think running the numbers on ideas like that and taking them as far as possible is a hugely important process in fully understanding quantum physics and perhaps ultimately finding a Unified Theory... but there's really no way to establish whether there are or are not bubble universes in actuality, because by definition, they're simply not observable, nor would they ever be.

still... cool stuff.

I'm with you.

I did forget that this thread is about TIME! The Brian Greene interview really is interesting, if a little bit "theoretical."

I have a huge problem because I would not ever be able to run the numbers on these things, so I will never have anything more than a dilettante's understanding of it all.

I read most of A Brief History of Time, but he lost me at the end. These limits can be frustrating because, like I said, I don't have the talent for the mathematical part. It is mind boggling to me that mathematical equations can actually express theories and "circumstances" or "qualities." Does that make sense? What is the mathematical equation for a hot dog? Or a guy sitting in a park listening to Bach's Cello Suites performed by Fournier?

Brian Greene would say, yes, there are mathematical equations for all of those things. And even mathematical equations that can express what the man would listen to in an alternative universe.

Those are the kinds of equations I would like to understand.

Brian Greene's another book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, has a very lucid clarification on how the so-called "arrow of time" emerges out of the Second Law of Thermomechanics.

When discussing about the concept of space-time, one have to specify the scale: On a macroscopic scale, most physicists subscribe to the Einsteinian picture: that although neither space nor time is absolute in itself, (and both are relative to the observer) the whole space-time metric is absolute. However, on the minuscule scale of the quantum (the so-called Planck scale: the smallest of lengths and the briefest of times), space and time are believed to fluctuate in a haphazard manner, and concepts like "before" or "after" cease to have any meaning. How to reconcile the Plank-scale world (rife with turbulent "quantum foams") and the macroscopic picture (with its absolute space-time metric) is a challenge in theoretical physics.

As for "multiverse", be aware that the term has been used to refer to a number of different things: are we talking about new universes springing, from time to time, out of some ultra-special physical entities like black holes (the "bubble universes" type of theories)? or are we talking about how our present universe somehow "splits" whenever something happens, with different outcomes happening in different universes (Hugh Everett's Many-worlds Interpretation)? Some versions of Many-worlds Interpretation may indeed threaten the concept of time: people speculate that all "possible worlds" are already lying in wait, ready to be "picked up", and we are merely presented with different slices of "instances" that have always existed (e.g. as discussed in Julian Barbour's book The End of Time).

this thread calls for a donut

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking.

Or

Hugh Everett III

You're talking about an english teacher, not a physics teacher.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that your teacher is leaning more in a kurt vonnegut direction than an albert einstein direction.

In Slaughterhouse Five, as it says, billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time, and from moment to moment finds himself living as a prisoner of war in WWII, or married and raising kids, or any number of other things. This causes him a great deal of distress until he is abducted by a race of 4th dimensional aliens (Tralfamadorians) who explain to him that linear time is just a perception that human beings have - that all moments in time exist equally, always have existed, and always will exist. Tralfamadorians see the whole of time at once, and are slightly confused by the concept of linear time. They also insist that humans are the only race they've even heard of that have a concept of free will.

It's an interesting take on predetermination but you can't read too much into it. The book is semiautobiographical - Vonnegut was a prisoner of war and survived the bombing of dresden - which was so bad that the pavement in the streets boiled. He was then forced at gunpoint to collect the charred bodies of the dead.

He suffered from rather severe post-traumatic stress. In one of his essays, he explains that when he was living in Cape Cod and working as a salesman for a Saab dealership, he had two big black labrador dogs. He said that every day, he'd get home from work and wrestle with the dogs for a while, and it was great.

One day he came home and his son said "Dad, you always play with the dogs but you never play with me" - so he wrestled with his son for an hour, and it was great - he said it was just like wrestling with the dogs. And he never did it again.

What Vonnegut is saying - and it gets explained further in Sirens of Titan - is that things just happen. Life is filled with good moments and bad moments and all of these moments, objectively, are both meaningless and inevitable. The way to survive - at least if you're billy pilgrim - is to focus on the good moments and ignore the bad moments.

English teachers are often bad at physics, and fair at philosophy.

The mathmatical equation or answer you seek has been determined. It is...42


On the serious note. This little animation is kinda neat.

Relativity Example - More Detail

Show up late to class. If she complains about you not being on time, remind her of her theories

thread over.

dammit, my watch stopped