Nature of Time

All my life I have taken an interest in the concept of time and how it might work. I would often watch YouTube vids, read magazine articles and browse the Discovery channel to feed my appetite for a better understanding.

Up until last week I was of the impression that their are lots of interesting theories but not many answers, then one night I was watching the television series 'Heroes' when I had a light bulb moment. In Heroes there is a Japanese character called 'Hiro' that can control time.

Basically Hiro concentrates hard > time stops > hiro escapes bad guys.

While watching Hiro make his escape and looking at all the frozen bad guys I realised that there is no time - it has to be an illusion. Think about it!

Time is movement, when things are moving they give the impression of flowing time - if things don't move then time stops. So time is a concept and not an actuality. The illusion of time is created by mass in motion.

No motion > No time flow.

Any way I would love the get some other members opinions and I'm sure a lot of people must disagree so please let us know if you have had any strange experiences with time or if you have your own ideas.

Cheers

[edit on 3-4-2009 by el.rebelde]

In a sense you are correct.

In some ways that's stating the obvious but each needs his/her own analogy to grasp that which is largely beyond our comprehension.

Acording to science (current science that is) time is about entropy which could sort of be described as disorder. The universe is moving from a highly ordered state toward a disordered state. This is what we percieve as time. While local entropy can decrease, overall entropy in the universe must increse.

An example would be say manufacturing a highly ordered car from scrap steel. While entropy of the materials goes down, it comes at the enxpense of released energy which is high in entropy. We somehow percieve this overall increase in entropy as going forward in time.

If all movement were to stop, entropy would, of course, stop.

reply to post by el.rebelde


loved reading this post more so because im a big fan of heroes "tho my fav cha is sylar" he is the true hero i think god dont get me started lol!!

But to answer your question - i think in my own opinion based on what i understand .

Time the way hero works is that time does infact stop but only on a level that supports the theory, in orther words time has many levels.. not just time that he stops on the show "bad guys ect" but that he infact uses time as a tool and there are many tools he uses. lets look at afew he does in this regard

He stops time for others but not himself - would require 2 times.. one for him and one for the "escaping" the bad people

as you rightly pointed out by the observation of his own movments!!

Then he can also traverse times past/present.. like peter did when he went to new york but that timeline was corrected by the actions of the past!

also matt parker seen time via his paintings and blew up the capitol.. when infact he didnt!! but yet this was the future he saw and painted

So one can see a pattern here with time

its based on many levels and is also able to stop giving each sonario!

or level ect and also depends on what one is doing within time.

So if time is a river then for each partical that makes up the river that flows is infact one mans time not anothers "as is clear in heroes" and when it does infact flow one can go back in time but one does not infact change time as it was already a possiblity in the first place "quatum physics"

so no matter what one does with time the outcome will be the same as to stop time itself would destroy the universe

Time is the very thing that enables the universe to expand and ecsist on a level we understand as logical..

I hope you can get your head round that.. I did my best to try to explain time travel and why you was correct that time does not infact ever stop.. "into infinity"

nice thread s+f for good obersvation skills and coz the show rocks hehe

time is movement yes and our planet is moving around the sun, our solar system moves around our galaxy "cosmic year and our galaxy is moving through the universe.

Time also sseems different, depending where you are.

reply to post by el.rebelde


Your right. If stop motion, then stop time. Conversely, if stop time, then stop motion.

It seems they are one in the same, just different perspectives on the same "state of affairs". We humans have deduced that motion itself requires position (space), and how long it takes to move from one position to another position merely by human counting at a constant interval (time).

Intuitively, one may posit that for space to exist, time or duration must occur beforehand. However, the same can be said for space, that is, it must occur beforehand in order for time or duration to exist.

I think the only way to make some sort of logical sense out of this little problem is to assume 'space and time' is logically equivalent to saying 'space-time'. Furthermore, if one speaks of space but not time, one really implies time as well (and vice versa).

Since the dependence on one another is so great, perhaps we humans need to form a new word that describes the dependence between space and time. Maybe we have, and its called velocity.

Anyway, ttyl

[edit on 3-4-2009 by Unlimitedpossibilities]

Time is movement, yes. For us, it's the movement of thoughts. If time were frozen, we would stop thinking. You could say that time freezes in between thoughts. Since we're constantly thinking (consciously or otherwise), reality keeps playing for us like a movie. A string of thoughts, one to the next.

I've given some thought to the subject of time and I choose to make a distinction between 'observer time' and 'universal time'. I think there are at least 2 dimensions of time. I made a post about it here if you're interested.

Time is just an illusion, it doesn't exist. The easiest way to understand this is to look at it as a movie film.

If you were all knowing(god), then you would view the entire movie film at once. As all is known, there is no motion, no change, no time. Only by taking on a limited perspective(son), and viewing the movie frame by frame do you get the illusion of time, change, motion and so forth.

If you know all, then you know all possibilities. So instead of 1 film, it's many films stacked on each other. This is what quantum physics hints at, and where science meets religion/philosophy. Once you realize reality only appears "linear" to us because our paths are linear, then you step beyond the realm of action/reaction and the conventional laws of physics built upon it.

What is 4d? 4d is the nearest 3d realities stacked on top of each other. You can see partial 4d in a timeline, and time is called the 4th dimension because it is our movement within the 4th dimension(again, appears linear). The truth is you change dimensions every "moment" in time, as the change from 1 dimension/point to the next is what creates the illusion of time.

A jump in "time/4d" is just a movement in this. We just look at jumps in time as going back in our own linear path, rather than other directions.

But you know something that is funny? People always talk about going back in time to create some kind of action that changes the future. And all the while they fail to realize the same thing is possible now.


[edit on 4-4-2009 by badmedia]

"time" is man made...we are controlled by numbers, clocks, years days seconds months hours.. if none of those numbers existed there would be no "time" i mean 1 day could go on forever, or as long as it lasted it would be an infinite flow so to speak. there would be no morning or night, yesterday or tomorrow.. we would just be free

I've always thought that man made time to control people

reply to post by el.rebelde


Hi,

Suggest you read 'End of Time' by Julian Barbour - in it he suggests that we live in a relative configuration space - it is the changes in configurations that give the impression of movement and time. Basically all possibilities exist 'now' - including multi universes.

As posted earlier - we humans may psychologically and biologically 'play' the changes as a film and hence perceive movement and time.

He gives an great example of his cat Lucy jumping and gives an extract from Richard Dawkin's 'The Selfish Gene' ;

'Haemoglobin thornbushes are springing into their 'preferred' state in you body at the rate of about four hundred million million per second and others are being destroyed at the same time.'

As such the cat that Barbour saw jumping is not the same one that lands...
'Microscopically her 10 to the 26 atoms werte rearranged to such an extent that only her gross features enables us to call her one cat.'

Incidentally he is no crackpot as he is recognised as discovering a far deeper meaning of Einstein's theories than were hitherto understood.

Peace!

reply to post by badmedia


Cheers for your posts,

I like this idea a lot - the idea of time being like a series of frames or a movie reel. We only perceive now to be now because of our limited perception. I have read about this theory before but I like the way you explaine it so thanks for sharing

but the movie real moves..

so its goes back to square one! and it requires preception

we just aint got a clue what it infact is but we can summerise some of its properties.

no evidence to stop time or go back or do anything or than to be inside it..!

if we use bad medias way of thinking then one could do all but then again we dont infact live in a film strip

we live in a 3d reality that is constucted from things we do not know or unerstand, tho a great description we just aint got the foggyest.. as you can see from all the posts inculding my own

time and life is just an expirence.. dont worry its not infanit ! lol ; )

reply to post by symmetricAvenger


'But the movie real moves..' (not sure if you meant 'really' or 'reel'?)

Barbour's approach is that though we think we see reality when we see a movie - in fact, the stills are the reality - and in our everyday life. It is our human perception that makes it appear that there are smooth movements.

Interestingly here is a meeting of cosmology, quantum physics, psychology, religion, biology and philosophy - in short, us.

Peace!

I think our descriptions of Time are wildly inaccurate.

It may be that Time is a real thing in which reality unfolds. We cannot perceive the time/event structure because we are embedded in it and one-dimesion short of being able to jump out of it. Time is our Flatland limit.

Time will act like a membrane on reality. No amount of energy within reality will be sufficient to break free of Time. We can stretch it as much as we want but we simply haven't the power to break it.

What is on the other side? I don't know. But I can try to imagine a 3d shadow of Time.

If we could somehow jump out of Time, we would see all that is or ever was laid out like a three-dimensional gel. Each and every single event that ever happened to anything will be forever recorded in the medium of Time.

Time could be a real thing and we simply perceive its shadow.

This may also go a long way toward reducing the number of spinning, splitting, phasing, moving and other verbs we often use to describe time but what actually describe what time is not. We could then get back to focusing on our Time and our Reality. The one we all really share.



[edit on 6-1-2010 by mike_trivisonno]