What are your thoughts on time?

the big question is where does infinite end... but i'm wondering, when does infinite begin?

 

3.1415

 

I think "I don't know" is a sufficient answer.

 

'Time is natures way of stopping everything from happening at the same time.'
I read that somewhere. Love it.
I know for practical reasons you have to live under it: bed time, meal time, work time, play time, time off, on time ....... but I'd rather not live under the clock.

 

yea, i hear its boring under there

 

According to string theory, time is the 11th dimension. If we can travel through time, we must be entering parallel universes to avoid the grandfather paradox (and according to Einstein, time travel into the future is absolutely impossible, because the future hasn't happened yet).

I think time is linear, but it contains cyclical patterns, especially if our universe is a Cyclical Model. Time began with the Big Bang, and therefore at one point there was no time at all. But if we had a Big Crunch, then we had a few billion years of time before our current universe began, and the matter involved was the same. So time is linear in repetitive segments. But then, the physical laws of the universe might change with every successive Big Bang, so time travel might have been perfectly normal the last time around. Who knows? It might have been its own spatial dimension back then.

 

Heh, I was all about to start a thread about time, and here you have one already. Maybe in the future I told Satya to start it.

I don’t think time is linear, I think time is a point. But a very dynamic one.

I heard an idea about time that really resonated with me, and it goes like this: Time doesn’t exist, because the past only exists in memory, and the future is only prediction, based on memory. So the only thing that exists is the present.

That totally makes sense to me. No past, no future (kind of depressing thought, but anyway), just the present moment. Then I started wondering why it seems like there’s time, and I came to the conclusion that it must be our mind’s way of dealing with change. Even if the only thing that exists is the present moment, things are obviously changing. Your eyes are changing position as you read this. So what we perceive as the passage of time is only our mind’s capacity for processing the rate of change of the present moment.

Which makes all those times when time seemed to either speed up or slow down make sense, because all that was really happening was that your mind was changing the way it perceived change, while the true rate of change of the universe remained constant.

Definitely cyclical patterns, but what if that humongous cyclical pulsing pattern of Big Bang to Big Crunch is happening in a single moment that never had or will have "time," and the only reason we think it takes billions of years (linearly) is because that's all we're capable of sensing about the rate of change of the universe?

As far as whether or not the physical laws of the universe will change in the next go round, eh, I don't know. When I originally read that I thought about evolution and thought: of course, some kind of evolution must occur between iterations. But for there to be evolution, something has to be carried over. And if all the matter of the universe is getting crunched down into a singularity, I don't really think it's going to be able to carry anything into the next iteration. To me that leaves the question of consciousness. What happens to consciousness at the point of transition between iterations? Can some kind of consciousness survive? If so, then yeah, the laws of physics might change, and in a sort of progressive, pattern based way. But if not... well, maybe they will change due to random circumstances, but at a basic level, doesn't physics try to describe interactions between physical matter? And if all the matter is the same iteration to iteration, how can we expect it to suddenly behave differently towards itself?

 

42

 

I believe that time is static. It's just another dimension like space and our passage through it is an illusion created by memory. The past exists, the present exists, and the future exists, just like forward and backward do. Our brains can only capture finite slices of time into awareness, but these are overlapping averages of an object's varied spatial state.

Perhaps we are moving in other directions of time or at different speeds, but we'd never know it without some outside observe for reference.

 

I don't have the scientific or technical language to express how I envision time, and there's probably a more "modern" analogy to draw, but I tend to think of time in the context of something like this:



That many (perhaps infinite) "times" or "states of existence" or "dimensions" are existing simultaneously and that if we could pick up the arm, and place the needle down elsewhere, we could be in another time, or dimension.

But again, this is but one of many trains of thought and beliefd I'm still working the kinks out of in my mind.

 

I also had a spiral shaped idea about time, but it was a spiral extended in 3 dimensions, like a Slinky. If you look at a spiral like that from the right angle, basically looking straight down the "tube", you see a circle. That circle represents one life cycle, birth to death. Where you are in your life is where you are on that circle.

Now let's say you take a pencil and put it on the slinky, parallel to the way the tube is running. The pencil and the slinky are always going to intersect at the same point on the life cycle circle. So if the intersection of one loop of the slinky and the pencil represent where you are in this life, then where the pencil intersects all the other loops of the slinky represent where you were (or will be) at this same point in your other lives, past and future.

Does that make sense?

 

You clearly never suffered a childhood Slinky accident *shudder* *peer at finger*

 

Despite everything I have learned, I strongly feel that time is non-linear, and that it is possible for one to distort there own time frames at will or by accident (mostly the latter).

 

I'm sorry, its nice idea, but there is scientific proof to the contrary. People have observed how Einstien's theory of relativity is true (matter coming off a black hole having a ton of kinetic energy, but not traveling as fast as it should). For this to work time must exist as a property, dimension, or somethiing to that effect.
Personally (ie. with no proof, only thought), I feel that time is a linear, non-directional dimention, like what nom was saying, except about why we feel time is directional. I think its because everything we can preseve has similer inertia through time. My ideas on this aren't fully developed, because this idea still doesn't incorporated relativity, but, oh well.

 

Please explain further...

 

so... Relativity says that the sum of an objects velocity though space and time must always add up to the speed of light. therefore, if something travels faster through space, it will travel slower through time. People tested this by using two atomic clocks. On the east coast of the US, they calibrated the two clocks. One clock was driven across the country, the other was flown. When they were in the same place again, they found that the flown clock was slightly behind. In order for this to have happened, time has to be more than a point.

 

Time is a concept. And it is irrelevant.

Yup.

 

Definitely.

I don't know how... but I do think it's possible.

I think that time is a linear construct that exists within our minds so that we can live life here on earth - it's part of the human reality. However, I think that existence is infinite and perhaps once we awaken from being human (i.e. die), our experience of "time" changes entirely - in that it stops being linear, that the past, present, future all exist at once. That we are not restricted by it.

On earth, things happen in cycles - seasons, daylight, nighttime, growth, animal migration, etc.. And we created our time-system as a way to measure our reality and organize our world. So time is very real to us, and very linear to us - but outside of the reality of being human, it is something entirely different and appropriate for the infinity of existence. Perhaps it doesn't exist.... isn't that what infinity is, timelessness?