h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Absolutely But even where the variations are tiny, there's going to be a hottest moment and a coolest moment. The point I'm making is that the length of time between the hottest moment and the next such moment is a year and that that unit of time has the same length there as it does in places where you do have four seasons.

Not sure such a thing could be counted on. I´d imagine there could well be other influences which would cause cycles of another length. Influences such as El Nino.

Can you finish that sentence Noggin?

Because many cultures certainly have more experiences of time than just linear, and some say that linear time (as least as we practice it in the West) is a relatively recent invention. So if one didn't experience linearity, then would one not experience time?

Time (in the sense that we experience it) is not a feature of the "external universe". It is "the form of inner sense" (Kant). One thing is experienced, then another, then another. Even if I travelled backwards in time, my experience would still have this form, though my order of events would be different to others. The supernova that I see two seconds after looking into my telescope, actually happened millions of years earlier, but my experiences still have this sequential form.

What would it be like/what would it mean to experience time in some other way (or, more accurately for our experiences to be organised atemporally, or even aspatially, for in these cases the terms space and time lose their meaning, become something else)?

Noggin

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime double so"

The intriguing research by Julian Barbour offers serious consideration and support for DNA's amusing speculation.

" ... time is an illusion.
The phenomena from which we deduce its existence are real, but we interpret them wrongly.
My arguments are presented in 'The End of Time'."

http://www.platonia.com/

In a manner of speaking, everything _is_ happening at once. We merely fail to appreciate this, or are incapable of doing so

" ... time is an illusion.
The phenomena from which we deduce its existence are real, but we interpret them wrongly.>>

Strictly speaking, time is the phenomenon. The *noumena* (things as they are in themselves) from which we deduce its existence are real. But deduce is a poor choice of verb for a form of mental organisation that is basically innate. Moreover, all phenomena are interpreted. That is the nature of phenomena.

Noggin

kea can you name the cultures that experience time non-linearly so that we may research them?

Hi Noggin

I think that's kind of what Barbour has in mind: We interpret whatever is 'out there' according to out nature -- innate mentation, etc. In so doing, we objectify time, in a manner of speaking, and interpret 'things' as having linear duration, when it may be more accurate to consider reality, (noumena), in terms of an infinite, multi-branched concurrent 'event'.

Apparently this multi-branch theory provides more 'elegant' solutions for many of the otherwise paradoxical results of quantum mechanics

But it's approximately around this point where my brain begins melting...

"out nature" --> "our nature"

Sounds about right

Noggin

If time doesn't exist then why do I get tired?

az

You just 'think' you're tired...

No the branching out that they talk about with quantum mechanics wouldn´t change the direction of time, it would still move forward in the manner it does now.

Except that in this view, time doesn't actually move at all. The universe is in some way, a "fixed" state that exists throughout what we *perceive* as time.

Noggin

Argh!





Yesh! It all makesh shensh!

Hi N, A and T. Greetings X.

Time is of course perceptive, or how else could it be relative? I classify it up there with love and a good sandwich, all three still undefinable by mere language.

Cheers!

cl

PS, what time is it?

"It's groove o'clock"

Deee-lite - "Try Me On, I'm Very You"

Morning Noggin.

If Time doesn't exist, who is the old guy I see shaving in the bathroom mirror each morning? He thinks he is the same person whose photograph is on the sideboard downstairs: aged about 30 and with three small children on a beach. The old guy has all that young mans traits and memories, so something must have passed between then and now....

No matter how you all discuss the units, theories, cultural percepions ,and the involvement with mathamatics, you and I were born and will someday die. The period between those events is the passage of time surely, however you describe it or measure it?

Novo

<>

I've often asked myself the same question. If you find out, let me know.

More seriously, no one is suggesting that we do not experience the passage of time. It's the relation between this felt sense of time and the structure of the universe that's the problem.

Noggin

Does it then come down to looking for a substantive *thing* that represents it, a particle of some description? This I guess would require 4D glasses.

I really enjoyed The Langoliers.

Also the rate of change of the speed of that passage increases as you older. When you were 5 a year was 20% of your life: when you reached 50 that same ammount of time was only 2%.