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

Time can be perceived, but without a standard for comparison, it becomes subjective. Just ask a kid about "a long time ago," a measure of time they frequently use which can refer to any period longer than three days.

And that goes for length as well. Without an agreed upon standard of measure, it all becomes subjective. Most men think they're long, but some longs are longer than others.

But either measurement means that which is being measured exists, just with different perceptions of that existance, no?

If you're measuring length, then the object you are measuring exists, but "length" is just a concept you use to understand its size, just like "width" and "depth."

Just as length, width, and depth describe a distance interval between "here" and "there," time measures an interval between "now" and "then."

There can be a "now" and a "then" but the they cannot be grouped as the passage of time? An auto moving from here to there still travels a distance, is measurably different than it was, and moves on a measurable vector. The car exists, the road exists, the journey exists in that it happened. Why didn't time pass just because we measure it?

The car is a physically existent object, as is the road. The journey is an observable event. However, the time and distance traveled do not have a physical existence... they're simply abstract concepts that help us understand the relationship between the beginning and the end of the event.

Length is not an object, time is not an event. They have no physical reality.

So that which is measurable does not necessarily exist. That would seem to be a conundrum. Could it exist as a physical reality but not proven as such at this point in.....time? Much like a quark for instance or quantum foam.

"So that which is measurable does not necessarily exist." - There is a slight flaw in this statement. The thing that is being measured is not length, or time. In the case of length, you're measuring "the length" of a physical object. Length is a property of a physical object. You can measure a physical object and describe a dimension of its size by the abstract concept of length.

Likewise, you don't measure time, but you do measure the duration of an event, for instance. The time is a property of the event, not an actual event itself.

Sounds vaguely religious. Just as with that argument you can't prove the non-existance of time any more than I can prove the existance.

heres a few points.

1. show me length? easy, show me a long road, now show me time? pretty hard no?

2. Take a dog for instance, if u go out to the shops, and come back 30 minutes later the dog will still be waiting for u at the gate, go on holiday for a weekend, come back 3 days later, the dog will still be waiting, it doesnt know the difernce between 30 minutes and 3 days, time is only expiernced by humans.

3. something causes us to expiernce it, one way to show this is to get 2 clocks, 100% accurate with the same time, stick one on the top of a tall building and the other at sea level, leave them for a while, then go back and read them, they will be difernt times, from the hight difernce. Could gravity affect time?

4. Light travel or close to it causes time to go slower for the person in the ship and longer for the people on earth.

5.Black holes, i dont know if they do anything against time, any ideas?

and different people have different experiences of time. if we are asking what if time didn't exist we would first have to agree what time is.

the west generally thinks time is clock or linear time. the rest of the world works more in process time. ditto kids and dogs.

personally i don't think time exists in the way we have been told to think of it. its a collective illusion (sometimes useful, sometimes not)

Now look what you've done!

It says "Thursday" on the Front Page of h2!

You've broken time!


You and your mucking about with quantum foam.......

Music would sound very interesting if everything happened at once - one enormous chord I guess. Gareth Gates songs might actually sound better

controversy!

I guess humans are the only species that can appreciate music. This would prove they are the only living beings to experience time.

What would you do if you could stop time but you could still move about freely. Would you use it for personal gain or to save the world. I know what i would do.

And i would look up girls skirts, honest!!

Black holes are so powerful they rend a hole in the fabric of space-time and absorb light, the fastest thing in the universe we are aware of. What this causes is Relativistic Time Dilation. Pilots and astronauts who travel at high velocities have been found to age slower, and their perception of time outside the vessel (insignificantly) sped up the faster they travel. As you approach the speed of light the pace of the universe gets progressively more and more out of synch with your own.

If you were to throw a clock into a black hole, the image of it would stop at the event horizon and sit there recording the moment it crossed, beyond which you wouldn't be able to see it, because the light can't travel quick enough to get out (hence they are 'black'; though Hawking apparently found some theoretical quantity of radiation that does escape, suggesting they're not always *completely* black).

So time can be a matter of individual perception, but it would still *exist* without anyone to perceive it. If a tree falls in a forest and there's no-one in the universe, would anybody care? No, but the tree would still have to go from the position of being upright to the position of not being, which takes some quantity of existence in which change can occur, i.e. time.

If you could effectively 'freeze time' and experience a 'moment' in isolation outside of it, it wouldn't be a lot of use to you as there would be no interval in which the position of a light particle/wave could travel to the next point in space on its trajectory, so no time for the light to reach your eye. All you're going to find up there is darkness I'm afraid.

A similar effect to RTD can be experienced with temporal lobe epilepsy, hallucinogenic drugs or too much Pepsi.

I take your point(s) but have a question. If something doesn't exist in a tangible form like *running* or *love* or *time*, why is it linked with other things that involve cause and effect? Why do we say *love* exists for instance and yet not time? Why are we willing to have belief in theories that light is energy and matter or the existance of particles which may or may not have mass but not in the belief that time might very well be a particle or energy rather than a process? We have no proof or even supportable theory to mback either belief so why must one be held to be true?

Time is linked to cause and effect because time is what we use to sort out cause and effect. In order to find out what was the cause and what were its effects, we have to be able to sequence the events.

We accept that light is an energy and/or a particle because it is a physically observable phenomenon. We can also analyze it, manipulate it, and create it.

Can you make time?

Sure, just let me put this other stuff aside....

Seriously, can make gravity?

And don't say by increasing mass because that's not you making anything.

Perhaps gravity is just a concept which also doesn't exist.