No such thing as time - Question about Albert Einstein
May 15, 2009 at 10:53 PM Post #31 of 39
Another possibility is that your teacher just isn't very good at her job, and doesn't understand that the application of this philosophy in the book is actually a metaphor for something else.

Haven't read hesse, so, I don't know.

Who was it who said, "Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."?

Maybe what hesse is saying is that we are nothing but our perception of the world, and our memory and forethought which are extensions of perception. All of these things are so faulty as to be considered infinitely flexible.

You are your experiences, hopes, and fears. Causation is linear but irrelevant - everything happened because it must have happened, so the events in-between don't matter because the present was always unavoidable and always perceivable.

We are essentially machines acting on input, and we cannot control our input. All things in the universe react to external and internal forces and the chain of causation is surely as inevitable as the river.

We are all here today due to everything we have ever experienced, and this was unavoidable.

So, I think, when hesse is saying that time doesn't exist, he's saying it's irrelevant; it isn't worth consideration.

From the science perspective, time isn't tangible and is impossible to define as a 'thing'. But that doesn't even enter into it.
 
May 15, 2009 at 11:10 PM Post #32 of 39
Quote:

Originally Posted by FalconP /img/forum/go_quote.gif
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).



In his lecture, Greene theorizes that universes spring up when the inflaton field fluctuates to zero value and gives up its energy into the creation of matter and all that. He calls them bubble universes.
 
May 16, 2009 at 6:05 AM Post #34 of 39
Well, what it boils down to is if the desert left Topeka at 6:51pm on a train going 0.46c, and dinner left Cleveland at 7:38pm on a train going 0.33c, am I getting any cake tonight?
 
May 16, 2009 at 12:10 PM Post #35 of 39
Brian Greene has some great postulations about what is really going on, but until it is testable, string theory and M theory will remain more in philosophy than physics. I don't think that Einstein ever said that "there is no time", your teacher may be paraphrasing or jumbling different authors (or watching too much Lost).
There have been people who put forth the ideas that there exists infinite universes in which every possibility is played out, or that time is like a river and it is always there, blah blah blah. This is all well and good but its not very useful or testable quite yet.
 
May 17, 2009 at 5:45 PM Post #36 of 39
Quote:

Originally Posted by Calexico /img/forum/go_quote.gif
My English teacher is trying to convince us that there is no such thing as time. The past, present, and future are a conception used by humans because we can't comprehend the "truth". This truth is that all things exist at once and all things happen at once. People may think that they are acting on past experience but really aren't. She used Einstein as backing for this. My question is just, has Albert Einstein actually stated this?

The main things I found with a quick Wikipedia search (I am really clueless about Einstein) is the Theory of Relativity and the resulting Relativity of Simultaneity. Relativity of simultaneity, if I understood correctly, means that something that you think is happening at the same time is not happening at the same time depending on the frame of reference. The fact that he would even talk about simultaneity seems to contradict what my teacher tried to use as evidence to support that there is no such thing as time. If Einstein believed that there was no such thing as time, then all is simultaneous regardless of relativity.

So my end question is... does one of Albert Einstein's theories state that there is no such thing as time?

This is from a simple 9th grade Honors English class. We are reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and she was talking about this because Siddhartha discovers that there is no such thing as time using the metaphor of the river. The stuff that is down the river is there even now. The stuff that is up the river is there at that same moment. I understand the metaphor but I don't see the proof.

PS. This teacher and I share a mutual hatred of each other.
PPS. My understanding of relativity of simultaneity might be overly simplistic or completely wrong. Sorry if it is.
PPPS. I don't mind the book stating this. I can suspend my disbelief for the story. But I don't want my English teacher teaching it unless this is like an accepted idea. I don't want her teaching it anyways because A) She's supposed to be teaching us English and B) I don't like her
tongue.gif


Oh yeah, and there's always the possibility that she is also just using suspension of disbelief and is assuming that we are to do the same. Although the way she teaches doesn't really imply that at all and she's never talked to us about it.



I believe your english teacher to be correct. Time is man made to a certain extent.. But you could argue that growth occurs over time..
 
May 17, 2009 at 10:40 PM Post #37 of 39
If a River had flowed the same direction for ten million years. How many times has the same water particle, passed the same bend in the River? How many air molecules from today have you shared with the Great Galileo from the past?

Our very own mortality makes us reach for the infinite! Our consciences are part of a collective that is multi-versal...wrap your head around that!
 
May 18, 2009 at 4:30 AM Post #38 of 39
Too long, so didn't read over all the posts. In short, no, Einstein never said there is no such thing as time. In the two theories of Relativity, he talked about how the frame of reference affects an individual's perception of time, as well as how the gravitational force ties in with the space-time curvature, but I don't remember ever reading anything about Einstein dismissing the notion of time. For example, a person traveling near the speed of light does not get "affected" by time (i.e. age) as much as a person "standing still." That's a very simplified explanation using very loose terms. He's also done some research regarding photoelectric effect and later, the unified field theory, but as far as I am aware, those don't have much to do with the conception of time either.

Siddhartha, I believe, is a reference to one of the Buddhas; being a cross of atheist and agnostic, I take anything involving religion with a grain of salt.
 
May 18, 2009 at 1:29 PM Post #39 of 39
Quote:

Originally Posted by ericj /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Who was it who said, "Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."?


it was Deacon Lunchbox who said, "Life is an illusion, so you might as well make it a good one."
 

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