What is Time???

This is kind of a spin-off thread from the one on time travel.
Anyway, simple question, what is time?
Simply defined, is it change or our measure of change as things change. According to relativity time is the forth dimention, one in addition to length, width, and height, and a fundamental measurement like those quantities. What do you guys think?

time- the one thing that contains and binds everyone and everything, the duration in which all things, people, events, etc... take place

it is not a series of events, because time cannot be broken up into segments, because by its laws everything has or will have a beggining and an end, nothing could have existed forever and nothing will(in it's current state); therefore since it contains everything time must be infinite.

but infinite is not a relative term, once we believed that the universe was infinite, and some people still do, but it is extremely hard to imagine and ending to the universe(different thread), so there may be an inconcievable ending to time.....

Time is something we made up in our minds to help dealing with life. It does not exist.

It another diminsion of the universe that we cannot fathom as we are only three dimensional creatures.

Like steel said, time is just something WE need in our lives. It's just a measurement.

I'm with Steel on this one... it's like a yardstick we use to measure our lives.

"time is what the clock says" -Albert Einstein

This pretty much sums up the idea of time very much like what steel has already said we use time to help us deal with life. However, much like what loismustdie said it is something that exists whether or not you choose to call it "time". Our life is a fixed unit. Everything is governed by it and it is something inescapable.

See, "Time"... seconds, minuets, hours, to me is just our way of quantifying the magnitude of change. Whether we were here are not, I still think time would exist. If the beginning of time is the "big-bang" then perhaps time is the gradual steady change of the universe from its beginning state to its future state (notice i said future state, not end state, so as not to imply the universe has an end or a finite temporal existence). But alas, from this form it is then extremely hard to say how time is a dimention comparable to length or width? I posted this question because I would say it is the hardest, or one of the hardest, we could ever try to answer. And YogsVR4, wouldn't you say we are 4-dimentional because we have length, depth, height, and time-span?

Time is something we never do what we should with and always complain we never have enough of. As has been said, simply a measurement; nothing more nothing less. How do we measure a day? with 24 hours. How do we measure those hours? with minutes, and so on and so on.

i just thought of somthing........

in stephen hawking's book, "the universein a nutshell"- he says that the the universe was at a single singularity, and since it had infinite mass, it had infinite gravity, and then with infinite gravity time would stop, but since time holds and bounds everything, and the only was for time to exist is for it to be measuring something, so since there is nothing for it to measure(e.g. hours, mins.) becuase of the singularity, time itself would not exist and therefore nothing would exist........damn i'm good





p.s. i'm probly just full of shit

If you think about it, you just also stated the situation we were discussing earlier when and if an object travels at the speed of light... infinite mass, infinite gravity, 0 length, 0 time. So at the begining of the universe was every traveling at the speed of light... in a manner of speaking. Maybe that is where the energy for the big-bang came from.

"time" is an english word

an english word is made up by man

so im with einstein on this..

hey look at this "ahh mummy i can see this invisible stuff floating around thats called time!!!"

well, i don't believe that the big bang is what started the universe, i believe that god created it in its current state several million years ago, but i don't want this thread to start a fired debate over the origin of the universe.........

so i guess if the situation that i presented would happen, then i hope that nothing ever reaches the speed of light.........

that is interesting, LMD, contrary to my belief in physics, I also believe that God created the universe... just becuase 20th, 21st century physics has a lot of unanswered questions, yet 'God" can never be an answer, but i think it is. There is only one answer to the question of how could SOMETHING come from NOTHING...God!

you know 80% of the threads that started out as good discussions get locked soon after religion is introduced

yes, i don't want this thread to be locked, and because i don't want his to become a heated debate.........

Joseph1082, what r u saying is contrary? if its somthing having to do with god and phhysics please present it(maybe i can clear it up), i'm just gonna leave the god thing alone.....

Ok. well let's not make this a religious thread... I originally asked what is time... I was just trying to state our similar beliefs. God can be part of physics, if that is your theory. But let's keep this as the what is time thread. I would be really interested in what others have to say.

Time is something we made up in our minds to help dealing with life. It does not exist.


:smile: time is a measurement of progression.. just something we made up like weight and speed..

but we didn't make up weight or speed, we simply made up their measurements... if we did not measure these quantities they would still be there none-the-less. Example, there are no speed measurements, but there are two objects, one traveling at 30mph the other at 60mph... although we'd have no designation for these speeds, we could easily observe that object 2 is traveling twice as fast as object one. It could be then stated that object two is traveling at a rate of "two object 1's".

thank you mister obvious.. youve just said the same thing 3 times in a same post

This is kind of a spin-off thread from the one on time travel.
Anyway, simple question, what is time?
Simply defined, is it change or our measure of change as things change. According to relativity time is the forth dimention, one in addition to length, width, and height, and a fundamental measurement like those quantities. What do you guys think?

ME : Once upon a time, there was a time when there was NO time ! In other words...time came into being at the very start of our finite universe out of nothing. Time started when the second law of thermodynamics started ..also called Entropy. The second law states that , this finite universe with its matter is gradually running down in energy from a state of order to a lesser state of order. This law is for everything in this finite universe, including US. But..before time and the second law came into effect, there was only infinity without time - this is where our Creator lives. It is a different dimension that what we know as our time, space, continuoum. When we die, our Souls which are made in the Creators image, returns to this dimension of infinity which is where they will spend eternity either in the presence of the Creator, or, apart from him. (our choice based on whether we accepted him or willfully rejected him while on earth ; he simply grants our desire). Can u imagine being totally unrestricted in eternity and being able to be everywhere at once ?! ANd, not having physical limitations , or limited knowledge , or limited actions ?? Then we will say : 'Once upon a time, there was a time,when there WAS time' !!!

Peace, Dave

OK first half your post good stuff me not being a christan *anymore* i'll disagree but thats whole nother story.

hey thats a good story tell me another one, its actually quite interesting

hey thats a good story tell me another one, its actually quite interesting


ME: Ray , Im not sure if you are referring to my post above or not, but....assuming you are , ill add this : Scientists now know that this universe including TIME ,matter , and all the scientific laws...came into being at a specific moment aka : The Beginning. This fact is based on 3 lines of converging evidence : The radiation echo from the Universe exploding into being, the 2nd law of thermodynamics which says everything that comes into being (finite) is running out of energy, and the red shift which is the remnant of the explosion. We can therefore concluded that either : This remarkable Universe/Solar System/Our Planet with all of its incredibly fine tuned engineering and design came from nothing by NO ONE (an impossibility) or, that this incredibly fine tuned Universe came fron nothing by SOME ONE who willed it into existence (a supernatural infinite being who is over all of Creation) . When one looks at the enornous razor edge precision of our Solar System alone...its obvious to see that such precision as 110 very narrowly defined characteristics of our Solar System needed simultaneously for earth to survive and for us to live on...can only come about from a very superior mind -- not blind random chance. What could this Creator want from us by clearly showing us that he is masterful at providing for our very existence ??? --- a very thought-proviking question to ask.

Well...i hope i didnt bore you too much. If this sort of Cosmology interests you , theres a good site at :www.reasons.org

Keep the shiney side up !
Dave

Time is something we made up in our minds to help dealing with life. It does not exist.

Yep

'Originally Posted by Steel
Time is something we made up in our minds to help dealing with life. It does not exist
'

ME : Well then...i think its time to check my clock as it appears it has stopped making time ! :)




_______________________________
"Once upon a time, there was a time, when there was no time" .

Couple of points, first off, i thought we were not allowed to make things into religious threads, second, to raysoh8, dont call me mister obvious, ok, casue i "obviously" know more about this than U, and i simply trying to contradict those that insist that there is no time and that it is something we made up, cause time is as inherent as any other fundamanetal quanity that can be mesured, but obviuosly that has not sunk in since people still agree that it does not exist. Third, I previously stated that there is a starting point to time (big-bang) whatever, and i must agree with the God theory due to the fact that it is the only logical explanation.

'[QUOTE=Joseph1082]Couple of points, first off, i thought we were not allowed to make things into religious threads,'

ME : Dont know if you are referring to 'my' post or not since i didnt go back and read every post made from the beginning ; if you are...then, its not 'religious' to refer to the cause of the Universe coming into being from nothing by 'a willful Creator ' (aka God) ; as you concluded in you post that it is the most rational scenario (considering that this universe shows incredible examples and evidences of a mind at work thru design/engineering -- parenthesis added by me).

Thank you, Dave

I just dont want it to be locked... since I study secualr physics, and math, and am a big fan of logic, i always believe the answer is the most logical, the idea that the universe came from... well, they dont really have an answer as to where everything came from. The entire sum of substance (matter and energy, which are interchangable) was once contained in a singularity before the big-bang, uh, ok, so where did it come from??? God is the ONLY logical answer.

it was a joke.. well it wasnt a joke, but it was something for you and me to laugh at, it wasnt a verbal punch-in-the-face

we are allowed to make religious threads, but most of them are usually locked when they become heated debates, which is almost inevitable.


time exists, saying that we made it up, and it is only a measurement is obsured, thats like saying, "my hand doesn't exists, i only imagine it existsing as an explination for why i can type in this thread"

i think that it is funny how secular humanists critisize christains for being illogical, when their entire system of "logic" defies one of the key principles of science -"matter cannot be created or destroyed"- i have argued with many a aetheist and they all believe that it came from "spontaneous generation" (which was disproven by louis pastuer)

we are allowed to make religious threads, but most of them are usually locked when they become heated debates, which is almost inevitable.


time exists, saying that we made it up, and it is only a measurement is obsured, thats like saying, "my hand doesn't exists, i only imagine it existsing as an explination for why i can type in this thread"

i think that it is funny how secular humanists critisize christains for being illogical, when their entire system of "logic" defies one of the key principles of science -"matter cannot be created or destroyed"- i have argued with many a aetheist and they all believe that it came from "spontaneous generation" (which was disproven by louis pastuer)

ME : Precisely. Atheists laugh at us cause we believe that SOMEONE (with intelligence) made something out of nothing...yet they dont see their irrationality of 'NO ONE making something out of nothing ' (and for no purpose whatsoever) !
PLUS....they know that this universe is on a razors edge and there is incredible design and engineering in our Solar System alone...yet, volitional unbelievers will convince themselves that it doesnt require a mind at work...only lots of time, matter, and a mega doses of chance. I cant believe that i was once duped in this philosophy at one point ; but i know the reason now why i was...and this fellow said it best :

"I didnt reject the Creator based on a lack of evidence, but rather, it was due to my sexual mores" -- Darwins Associate , Alduous Huxley.

Oh, my bad! I thought it was!

I don't laugh at people who believe that a God created the universe, I just don't believe it myself.

Yes I do believe in the big bang theory. And don't ask me to prove it, because you know I cannot. But that in itself is not disproof either.

well, no, it makes since. a big bang happend it formed the earth and for some reason made it go in a eternal circle around some big A$$ ball of fire at the exact perfect place, making water and trees and somhow humans grew from sea creatures to eventually little warm blooded mamels and evolved from monkey type things to humans. and all this time everything is going on, the earth never falls.

^thanks for explaining that, now it's all clear, you're right i'm wrong, wait that leaves big holes, how did the trees get here, i mean it would be unreasonable for anyone to think that plants to sprout without any seeds today, how come it's reasonable to believe that it happened millions of years ago?

Since this is an automotive forum... ;)

time = velocity / distance

^thanks for explaining that, now it's all clear, you're right i'm wrong, wait that leaves big holes, how did the trees get here, i mean it would be unreasonable for anyone to think that plants to sprout without any seeds today, how come it's reasonable to believe that it happened millions of years ago?

well during the big bang, the earth evolved into eventually water and dirt or land and somehow there were seeds already here :dunno: and over time they grew cause the dirt went over them. and it just so happens that whatever hit whatever made some formula to make creatures and living things that can dream and think, and oh, the formula was so perfect that it made it able for our heart to beat for 90 years without any batteries, duh hello, its common sense :screwy:

^thanks for explaining that, now it's all clear, you're right i'm wrong, wait that leaves big holes, how did the trees get here, i mean it would be unreasonable for anyone to think that plants to sprout without any seeds today, how come it's reasonable to believe that it happened millions of years ago?

Well dude. Not all plants are trees. I believe that pants evolved from single celled photoplankton to moss to grasses to the bushes and trees they are today. And making seeds to spread themselves was just a logical way to do it. It was a natural progression of things.

Well dude. Not all plants are trees. I believe that pants evolved from single celled photoplankton to moss to grasses to the bushes and trees they are today. And making seeds to spread themselves was just a logical way to do it. It was a natural progression of things.

first you said a logical way of doing it, then you say natural. did nature say "hey when i make a tree the logical way of making more is just simply to let the tree's have seeds in them already so when fall comes, i can reproduce more tree's" :lol2: just playin with you man.
but seriously, can nature have a logical way of doing things? in that case maybe what a lot of people look to as nature is really god.

what happened to the grandfather bedtime stories? they were more interesting to me than disscussions about which is fact and which is fiction..

then make a grandfather bed time story thread

Though i don't beleive in evolution... according to it after the universe completely formed, and conditions on earth were right for life, water etc, chemicals now known as amino acids reacted and formed protein, and then more reactions produced the most very basic monerans or whatever the first single-cell organisms were, and through the process of evolution, over manymany generation, they evoled into more complicated forms, yielding animals and plants, to make a long story short. But this story is illogical, how can SOMETHING come from NOTHING! Life to me is more than proteins water and compounds and chemical reaction... life is still a mystery, but i cannot say that life just popped up, plus this wolud mean that we today are nothing more than chemical compounds/reactions... is this the case?

i dont think its logical :icesangel

This comes down to what is your definition of life? Is it just a Carbon-based compounds organized in complex ways and chemical reactions. Are we nothing more than biological machines so to speak, totally programmed by nature, and that the thinking mind is just an illusion. I think life is more than this.

So we agree that:

"Time" is a man-made concept used to measure duration, as well as specify a juncture or occasion. It can represent the present, future, or the past.

The fascinating question is whether "time" is infinate or not (as man understands it to be). After all time is really nothing. Like many have said it is simply a concept created by man to better understand and facilitate our existence. Yet it seems as man understands it, time is infinate. It has no beginning and no end. It has no limit. Furthermore, man seems to think time exists. (Starting to sound strange yet?)

Man is a finite being. Individually we each begin, occupy, and then cease to exist in time. This appears to be the very essence of existence - to exist "in time". And we seem to think that everything in the universe exists "in time". And why not. Like ourselves we see other things come and go, occupy form and then not. It seems logical and according to how we understand time that everything must begin and end at some point.

But why?

I think the problem with the whole debate on whether or not the universe is infinate stems from our conception of time itself. Think about this: we are all finite beings. Yet we apply an abstract and infinate concept such as "time" to try and help explain ourselves and all other finite forms. Does this not sound wrong in some way? You think man would apply some finite abstract concept to better measure finite existence.

The truth is... "time" is nothing in the grand scheme of things, just as "we" are nothing in the grand scheme of things. People have to realise that things must be or not be a certain way simply because we can't understand them to be any other way. Who says we must know or are capable of understanding existence? I wonder if man is the only thing in the universe that is blessed(or cursed) with consciousness of his own existence. I am convinced that we (by nature) are simply incapable of understanding the existence of the universe.

And we are lucky we can't comprehend its existence - it would probably fuck us up even more.

We know too much about human existence as it is. Cloning, stem cell research, etc...

Can you imagine if we held the answer to the existence of the universe? We would never run out of things to ruin (or simply capitalize).

Can you imagine if we held the answer to the existence of the universe? We would never run out of things to ruin (or simply capitalize).
maybe some people do know the answer.

to me, everthing is vain, unless it has to do with helping people for the good. i always felt "if there is no god, whats the point of time" because if there is no god then time also is vain. of course this is simply how "I" see things. :)

Well, I think we cannot say that time doesn't exist, because it does... "time" may be our designation for the phenomenon, but whatever you want to call it, it is real, not some conception fo the human mind. Whether we were here or not, the universe would be dynamic, a changing universe, and "time" would exist.

having to describe time would be like trying to describe life, its impossible, one can only describe what one does with it or vice versa

well put, but i just dont understand how some can believe that time doesn't exist.

I don't think man is fully capable of understanding time, either that or our understanding of time is wrong altogether.

That is why we go crazy trying to understand how the universe could possibly be infinite. Well, it is. It has to be. No big deal. We are finite beings here on earth. Its no wonder we can't understand infinite existence.

Maybe when we die and begin to exist outside of time it will all make perfect sense... :naughty:

Well, I think we cannot say that time doesn't exist, because it does... "time" may be our designation for the phenomenon, but whatever you want to call it, it is real, not some conception fo the human mind. Whether we were here or not, the universe would be dynamic, a changing universe, and "time" would exist.

Exactly. Sayign that time is a fictitious idea mae by human is a very limited view of the world, well existence. Simply because we cannot percieve time within the constructs of the third dimension that we so easily percieve doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Sorry guys, Joesph right, time is real.

Also, I brought this up in the time travel thread before I came here. Though time is commonly defined as the fourth dimension, is that inherently correct? Reality as we percieve it is a third dimensional construct, three planes (vectors, whatever) of reality. What is to say that time as well does not have more than one facet. Afterall, no one has ever proved that time is a strictly "linear" phenomenon. In fact, ideas like those concerning multiverses suggest more of what I am hinting at.

Why speculate and theorize about the countless possibilities regarding 'Time' , when one can go right to The Bible which has never been proven wrong and which many Scientists are proving correct..such as : Agnostic Dr. Robert Jastrow founder of Nasa's Goddard Space Institute , Nobel Prize winner Agnostic (now Theist) Dr. Alan Sandage Cosmologist, agnostic (now Theist) Dr. Arno Penzias also nobel prize winner Cosmologist, Prof. Sir Fred Hoyle Physicist , MIT Physicist Vera Kistiakowsky, Mathematical Physicist and winner of the Heinemann prize Robert Griffiths, British Physicist Paul Davies, and famous American Astronomer George Greenstein author of 'The Symbiotic Universe' (1988)...et al.... which all firmly believe that there is in fact a personal Creator as the Bible indicates , who started the Universe out of nothing from nothing including all the known Laws of Science complete with time. Science is proving the Bible correct all the time, because it is a Supernatural Book given to mankind to learn from. And that to, is quite provable., should one only be willing to look into it.

Dude.... seriously.... are you just.... like looking for way to push the bible? I mean you mentioned time 1 time in your post and you pushed your scientific proof that that bible is truth... This is not a God post. You can make a God thread, go on and do it. On topic please.

Dude.... seriously.... are you just.... like looking for way to push the bible? I mean you mentioned time 1 time in your post and you pushed your scientific proof that that bible is truth... This is not a God post. You can make a God thread, go on and do it. On topic please.

ME: Alot of this thread has been about 'time' coming into existence ; the Scientific Law of Causality says that : Anything that comes into being (or has a beginning) , must have had a cause. Therefore, this thread is essentially 'A God Post' because it is ONLY the Transcendent Creator who could have brought 'time' into being along with space and matter. If you dont believe in God, then , you are faced with Nothing bringing something into being out of nothing --- sheer irrationality. By the way Dude...are you hostile toward God and if so, how come ?

No I do not think time is a man made concept. Measurement of time sure is. Time is a period between two or more events - from the sunrise to sunset is a period of time, if it were stagnant nothing would've happened. That we call this period one day, and that we separate it into night and day is a made up concept.

SwaveDave- Look, I respect your beliefs, but here's my two cents:

First of all, simply because we can't explain something doesn't mean that we can point the answer to something from an ancient book. The greeks thought that a god pulled the sun across the sky, that there was an end to the physical world and at that point the gates of Hades opened up. Well, a little while later we learned that they were wrong. So what say we not try to explain things we can't with things we can't back up.

If I wrote a book now saying that I created the universe, couldn't someone a thousand years from now given a nuclear war in the meantime dig my book up and use me as the reason for the universe's creation? Well, answer is he could, people are doing it today, but going back to my example, we all know I didn't create the universe.

btw, I'm not trying to be rude, but I get a little angry when people either try to prove something they can't or preach to me.

There are more dimentions than just 4, we perceive only four right now, length, height, depth, time. An object, say the great Pyramid, exists in this univierse, this is not in dispute. The Great Pyramid's existence spans the four dimention, it has range in all four, aka X1 to X2, Y1 to Y2, etc. It is so many feel high, so many feet wide, so many feet long, and will exist so many years, from 2500 B.C. whatever to whenever is cease to exist. It's existence from T1 to T2 makes time a dimention, a linear concept, the same as length or hieght. Now "space" one half of the Space-Time continuum, is three dimentions, so the "Time" continuum may very well be multible dimentions as well. A "Time" plane if you will, with a T vertical axis, and a Q horizontal... the Q coordinate refers to a selective alternate reality... at every Q=number, there is a vertical timeline, all posessing the same T's... 1900, 2000, 2004, etc, but all at different Q's, different realities. So while time travel is going up or down one's own timeline, reality travel would be holding T constant, traveling to different realities at the same time, 2004, etc. So an advanced for of travel would be to be able to tranvel diagnaly changing both Q and T. Now you could throw in another dimention or two...

Simply because we cannot percieve time within the constructs of the third dimension that we so easily percieve doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I think I agree - time does not exist in the way man currently percieves it.

So while time travel is going up or down one's own timeline, reality travel would be holding T constant, traveling to different realities at the same time, 2004, etc. So an advanced for of travel would be to be able to tranvel diagnaly changing both Q and T. Now you could throw in another dimention or two...

Again it all goes back to multiverses. You know, the more I talk about this subject, the more I am likely to accept that theory. That is regardless of sketchy the evidence/proof for it is. It simply helps explain so much that previously seemed inexplicable. But then again, without indisputable proof, I can't really fully support it. Joseph, do you know where I can find maybe the paper published from the people who devised this theory?