posted on Aug, 24 2006 @ 05:23 AM
Certainly an interesting topic! In your theory, is it the sheet that moves, and the sphere that rolls with it, or does the sphere move, and the sheet
sit still? Do they both move together?
I've often been intrigued by Immanuel Kant's theory of time laid out in his book The Critique of Pure Reason. He thinks "time" and
"space" are the ways that the human mind makes sense of the world. In other words, he wants to rethink all the arguments about whether space/time
are independent realities of the universe, or whether they only make sense with a population of objects in the world relative to each other. (Newton
thought that space/time was an absolute, such that if nothing existed in the universe, there would still be space. Leibniz, his intellectual rival in
Germany, thought that space/time only made sense if there were two or more bodies that one could measure relative to the other.)
Kant says, in a certain way, space/time is all in our heads. We can't really know what the universe is like in true reality. However, humans are
constructed psychologically to make sense of space/time in the way we do. I imagine he would say it's possible an alien race of beings could
experience the universe in an entirely different way than we do.