Does Time Exist?

[EastEnder]

Your speed affects your experience of time.

No it doesn't. Your experience is unchanged irrespective of velocity.

The rate of the passage of the time between you and someone travelling at a different velocity is affected. But only with relation to each other. Your watch stills ticks at the same rate. The other blokes watch ticks at the same rate. They only tick at different rates if you compare them.

 

[Hollis]

Christ! This thread reminds me that I'm a thick twat and I don't 'do' science. Many thanks.

 

[maya]

What does "exist" mean anyway?

if Dead Can Dance, then What Time Is Love, and Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

 

[General Ludd]

No it doesn't. Your experience is unchanged irrespective of velocity.

Yes it does. Or at least it does in the sense I meant it, which is clearly not the one in which you interpreted my post. It affects your experience of 'time' (in the sense of something general rather than personal) exactly as you described below.

 

[EastEnder]

Yes it does. Or at least it does in the sense I meant it, which is clearly not the one in which you interpreted my post. It affects your experience of 'time' (in the sense of something general rather than personal) exactly as you described below.

Fairy nuff.

Semantics, init.

Maybe "Your speed affects your experience of time with repect to something moving at a different speed" would appease those of us with a pedantic disposition.

 

[jcsd]

Time exists, so nah!

 

[MightyAphrodite]

Time exists, so nah!

That's pretty much the long and short of it.

 

[Leica]

Time is a result of movement. There is no time without movement.

 

[axon]

Depends <scuffs feet>
It exists in that events can occur sequentially. But events also don't tend to happen in the same location either, and I'm sure time as a phenomenon has something to do with things being in different places, subjected to different strengths of gravitational fields.

 

[Mation]

Went to a really interesting symposium on the neural representation of time last week.

A lab in Texas has been doing some fun experiments where they get people to press a button while as a light is flashed on a screen in front of them. If the light comes on anything up to 100 milliseconds after the button-press, people adapt and start thinking that the two are simultaneous. Introduce a beep after the press and before the flash, and people will think the beep came last. The point being that our brains don't necessarily represent the temporal order of events as they actually occur in the world...

From theirs and other groups' work it seems as though the same type neural circuit can represent time, space or quantity (e.g. before/after, left/right, more/less), which makes sense to me, but of course none of that tells us whether time exists in and of itself, outside of our perception.

Does it? Dunno.

No one has (yet) found a time receptor or an internal clock... I'm inclined to think that we won't, and that <scuffs feet> perceived time is all about spatial location.

 

[gaenor]

Weird, lately people have been starting topics on things that I've been thinking about recently.

Anyway, I don't think time exists. I think it's just a human perception. But at the same time, I think how can time not exist, if two things can be synchronised or some things can happen regularly happen at the same time, then how can time not exist. So I think maybe time doesn't exist as we know it, maybe we just don't understand it properly.

I'm even more confused now.

edit: I think there is no past or future, only 'now'. Stuff that happened in the 'past' happened, but it ain't happening any more. That's why I think the idea of time travel is completely ridiculous. Maybe time isn't something that can be expressed or understood using numbers, maybe it's some organic process that we cannot begin to truly understand

god told me that time is irrelevant it is the deed that is important. i had a god-given task twenty years ago to work with prisoners and offenders. i specialise in poverty and social exclusion. i've done everything in a democratic manner to highlight the problem eg reports to government, letters to the press etc but there have been periods when i despaired of the progress i was making. at a low self doubting moment i asked "am i wasting my time?"

"time is irrelevant, it is the deed that is important". i wasn't asleep, i was wide awake and with my daughter. i couldn't come to terms with it either (if that's what you're thinking!). for months i contemplated the instruction. what did i know at the end of the twentieth century? people get up (if they're not depressed), go to work (if they are lucky), go to bed (if they can sleep), get up, go to work, go to bed. surely it was all dictated by time as we knew it. more months went by. short long story time. i went for a walk up the mountain and found a fossil, shortly after i found a pound coin. fascinated by the fossil i ran my fingers over the print but then realised i was doing the same with the coin. then i understood. the one had taken millions of years, the other had been struck in a fraction of a second. the point was they had both left their mark. my only duty in my life is to leave a mark. but i had to accept that i may have been dead for some considerable time before anybody appreciated what i had done. and trust me i don't care if you personally don't appreciate what i have done for the poor. many years ago i was verbally attacked in a pub by a number of men who thought that "you are wasting your time, you'll still be doing this twenty years from now" i replied "yes, i will, but twenty years from now god will say, "well, you're still trying", but twenty years from now he will ask you "what did you do to help her?".

sing along "what have you done today to make yourself proud?"

 

[Diem K]

If you accept that space exists then I think time must also exist.

We inhabbit Spacetime - the four dimensions (3 space + 1 time) are wrapped up into each other.

When you look out into space you are actually looking back in time, humans have recently looked so far (15 billion light years) that we can see a boundary of radiation which is the fingerprint of the big bang which happened 15 billion light years ago.

I think a question similar to that of this thread is still relevant; given that we "know" Spacetime exists the question could be asked as follows:

Does the progression of time that we seem to experience exist?

I have no idea how to work out the answer to this teaser.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Witchita linesman was a song I once heard. [3am here]

I can hear you singing in the wires.

I want you more than need you.

And I want you for all time.....

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Our brains are 3-D critter parts and not really adapted to a 4-D universe (or an 11-D universe for that matter). If we were 2-D critters, with 2-D critter parts, we'd have some sense that there was another perception we were missing because things would pop in and out of our existence. We can perceive time in a similar manner, but can't grasp the whole perception of a 4-D universe because of our 3-D, critter-centric view.

In other words, I agree with JC2.

 

[nick1181]

Time used to exist... in the past, and it seems probable that it will again at some point... at this precise instant however, no it doesn't exist.



Everything's everything man.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Everything's everything man.

WoW, reality, what a concept.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

Hey, is that the time? I must be going!

 

[Brainaddict]

Could I nominate post #41 for weirdest post of the year please?

Thanks.

On the subject of time, I'm happy to admit I'm ignorant. Partly because everyone else seems to be too. I once wondered if time is kind of 'quantised' in little chunks, size perhaps determined by the speed of neuron activity in our brains, but then I realised that I didn't know what I was on about.

 

[dada]

this thread reminds me when the time an enlightment hit me when i was comtemplating on the relativity theory. i figured something out on immortality.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Yep, those pesky bits of enlightenment can be more dangerous than Newtonian apples.