Atercia

Is time realy as absolute as we often think it is? Or is it realy a transitory unsubstantial convinience, made by man for man or by god for man (depending on your view).

If you believe the Bible for instance it is often said that angels and God do not experience times as we do but more along the lines of all at the same time onan equal plane. Is therefor time only there to make things make more sense for us?

On the other side of beliefs we have the thought that man made time for man. In this situation, it was a matter of saying ok we are here this is when. So is time a reality or is it just a restriction/boyndary that we set upon ourelves. Or was set on us by another.

If this is the case is it not possible to trick ourselves into experiencing time diferently? It would certainly explain how when time seems to go slow it goes slow for many people at once or fast for many people at once, or how time goes by faster the older we get. Is this our reactionary thought process to the circumstances causing time to go faster or slower? When we realize we are closser to death does time speed up due to fear of death? If one does not fear death then would time not speed up as fast for them as they got older? Why do two people nearly identical in jobs and stress levels, genetics, health, diet etc age at diferent rates?

Would an individual then not be able to convince their mind that time is only transitory to the point of speeding up or slowing down various aspects of time to the point where for example they could go many days without sleep and not be phased by it?

Would such aspects of time also contribute to things such as de'javu, or viewing of the future?

Okies lets debate on the existance of time as a reality or a mentaly self enforced non-existant restriction.

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--Lead Me Not Into Temptation For That Would Involve Going Backwards!

--Love Is Patient Love Is Kind Love Means Slowly Lossing Your Mind!

--Fools Aren't Born, Pretty Girls Make Them In Their Spare Time!

And this is why physics is wonderful/terrible. Its like a bastard child of math and philosophy...

So, Newton liked to think of time as this fundamental part of the universe that was decidedly real. It's the idea of time like a filmstrip. You can pull it out and lay if flat and it shows you a definate sequence of events, one happening right after the other, there is a begining and presumably there will be an end. Newtonian time is like a container that events flow through. Time is absolute.

Immanuel Kant and company on the other hand saw time from the "not real" point of view--it is an intellectual structure that we can use with space and number to organize and sequence events for our own benefit. Kant saw both space and time as by products of out minds that we used to make sense of things with. Space we made up to measure the distance between objects and time we made up to measure the distance between events.

Then Einstein went and had his theory of relativity...and spacetime...time dilation...and eventually cosmic relativity. (All of which is dangerously close to quantum mechanics which is a super interesting subject but so far above my head that its sometimes easier for me to pretend it doesn't exist.) But basically Einstein is pointing out the Newtonian time and its relation to physics, while describing what most of experiece on a day to day basis, doesn't really work out in space. Suddenly we are confronted with the concept that time does not occur at the same rate in different places in the universe...ok thats not even remotely a good explanation, but its as good as I get.

The good new is you get to have all your time cake and eat it too. Newton's priciples obviously work on earth but are lacking. Kant provides some good basis for why we need it and how we use it. And Einstein went and explained stuff in ways that work for earth and space. So mostly, when I want to be intellectual I sit around and think about Kant and I toss around cosmic relativity in my head. But five minutes later when my smart juice runs out I can easily and comfortable revert back to Newton and happily get on with life.

Your second half of the post is much more interesting though...

Tricking ourselves into experiencing time differently.
Six years ago I was in a really bad car accident. Someone was speeding, ran a stop sign and t-boned me in an intersection on the driver's side. The side of my car was destroyed, the engine of my car ended up a foot and half to the right of where it should have been and I walked away scratch free. Right before I was hit everything completely slowed down. It must have only been a few seconds but I was able to react to the car which I only saw in the corner of my eye. I remember thinking to myself "that car is going to kill me" and I hit my brakes. The EMT told me that if I hadn't hit my brakes I would have lost my legs or worse. There is no way that the time from when I saw the car to the instant of impact was more than 10 seconds. It was too close by the time I saw it, yet that event was so crystal clear and slow to me in my head. It was like my brain slowed my perception so I had time to react properly. Which actually takes me back to quantum physics...there is some evidence that our brains react to stimuli just before it happens. I really suggest watching the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know" Its a documentary on all this junk and its so good. Its the very edge of what we understand about everything.

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"I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally
I write till sleep comes."

Ah, time. This is a tricky one.

As an athiest, I obviously don't believe in a God, therefore I view it from a science perspective. Time is merely a measurement has applied to the world so we can understand "when" we are. Time is calculated by how long it takes the earth to orbit the sun, a constant that remains the same: 365 1/4 days. Days are then divided etc etc.

Newton and Kant theories are almost identical in that they are saying that time is a construct made by us to show the order things occur.

Of course, then Einstein came along, and threw some interesting theories out there. However, here is the pickle: No matter where you are in the universe a second, defined by man, is always a second. Things may occur at different rates but our human definition of time is the same. The fact that things occur at different rates doesn't say time is behaving differently, it's saying the conditions of that environment allow for different rates.

My best example is a bullet shot from a gun. In the air it can travel at a certain speed. In water, the speed is greatly reduced. Has time changed? No, the conditions applied to the bullet have changed.

The second point where you say people's perceptions of time change with age etc is also arguable. A child's concept of time may be different to an adults. But witness a child and an adult in the same room and time behaves the same way for both.

Time going quickly for a lot of people is equally hard to argue because you might just have a busy day. Could you truly say the whole world has been affected by time having a "slow" day? And if time is behaving differently for different groups, how can time and the universe maintain a constant where at the end of the day we all experience the same timeline?

Final point, like Deadmouse, I know the feeling of time going slow. Now I don't know enough about the human body to understand everything fully, but I do know that when adrenaline is released time can appear to slow down as your reaction time increases? Adrenaline is also released with different amounts so in that moment when your life could have ended, your body might have thrown everything it had into keeping you alive.

I can't prove this with any certainty but I can't prove that you or the universe altered the rules of time either.

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Distant bonfire smoke with a hint of cinnamon; that's the smell of adventure

Ok kat then explain how it is that yes we come back to the same point in time at the end of each day... but is that not just a subconcious rule we set upon ourselves?

How is it that two individuals identical in every aspect of genetics and life style will age at diferent rates?

And they say stress causses you to age faster get grey hairs younger etc... but then when you are stressed does time not seem to go slower? it would certainly explain the greying earlier.

Also when a person is a jet pilot it is a proven fact that they age slower... would the circumstances not then be allowing for a diference in rate of time despite the individuals subconcious restraints in small amounts? If you were to stick one clock in a jet and leave one on the ground with the same battery life etc and check it some time later they would actualy have diferen't times... it is much like einsteins speed of light and time theory... is such things actualy allowing us to temporarily weaken the self made time restraints?

_________________
--Lead Me Not Into Temptation For That Would Involve Going Backwards!

--Love Is Patient Love Is Kind Love Means Slowly Lossing Your Mind!

--Fools Aren't Born, Pretty Girls Make Them In Their Spare Time!

I'm not sure what you mean when you say we come back to the same point in time at the end of each day? You mean like time of day?

With the two individuals with the same genes and lifstyles and with gray hairs...that's all aging, which is not the same as time. Everyone has two ages...The one that represents the number of years we have been alive and the their physical age which is more a measure of how their body is holding up. And there is ALOT that effects that second age. How happy someone is in their life can effect their physical appearence and age...Even if they experience the same amount of stress, one of the individuals may have been raised to handle stress differently and maybe affected by it more greatly than the other guy. So in a way, yes our perception can change time's affect on us. That is our mind is a powerful thing and can change our bodies physiology...But I'm not sure if there are accurate test subjects to try this out. I dont think there are two people that are sufficiently identical. Even twins express genes differently, thats why there are identical twins that look nothing alike.

And pilots, do they age slower? I've heard that before from pilots but always wondered if it were true. I guess that would sort of go along with Time dilation, the faster you go the slower time passes for you, and would back up Einstein, but I don't think anyone here on earth is going that fast. [/i]But, having known a lot of pilots I can tell you that most of them, all of the ones I've met anyway, love to fly. They really truly love their job and maybe that extra boost of happy makes them appear younger? Generally happy people look better, have fewer wrinkles, more elasticity in their skin and such. I don't have real hard numbers on that, but I've read enough in Cosmo so it must be true?

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"I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally
I write till sleep comes."

Likewise, what you are suggesting is very hard to prove. The thing with the clocks is a funny situation.

A clock is a mechanical thing. If we put one in the plane and one on the ground not moving I think they would eventually display different times but this is because a clock is mechanical.

The clock in the plane would be moving at several hundred miles an hour; this extra force may affect the mechanical parts of the clock, thus altering the time displayed.

However, does this mean some sort of time travel has been achieved?

No. because otherwise when you got off the plane you also would have achieved this time jump and end up in a slightly different time spectrum. The clocks may display different times (and remember this is a human representation only) but time is still constant. You get off the plane in the same time period as you got on.

To study this a third clock would have to be used to calculate which clock is displaying the correct time, 99.9% certain the one on the ground.

As for people, DNA means everyone is different no matter what conditions so everyone will age at different rates. Pilots may age slower but a proper study would have to take place to discover what the reason is; like Deadmouse says they may just enjoy their job thus making their age-rate lower.

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Distant bonfire smoke with a hint of cinnamon; that's the smell of adventure

Ah, my brain last night couldn't let this drop

I've been thinking about the pilot thing and while I don't believe for a minute that anything significant enough to cause lower aging can occur at the speed a plane goes, I can't help but think something may be occuring.

Einstein basically stated that if you travel faster than the speed of light then you can travel through time; the problem here is we'd get turned to mush and the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second (from Wikipedia) which we can go nowhere near.

However, what happens when you get up to speeds near it? It is just a magic number which you need to cross or would you experience things slowing as you reached it.

Back to the pilot. They would be travelling at a faster rate for longer periods of their life. Firstly, their speed is nowhere near what would be needed to get to the speed of light. However they may experience a slower sense of time because of the higher speed, though I have no evidence either way.

Final point from me is that even if the pilot's perception of time did change, we still base it from our own definition of time, which would mean no conclusive evidence can ever be reached >.<

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Distant bonfire smoke with a hint of cinnamon; that's the smell of adventure

Haha, I think this where I give in. My relationship with Physics has always been a passing flirtation at best. Sure there's lots of giggles and winks, but really, unless someone is buying me a dry, extra dirty martini I'm not staying around....

I couldn't let it go either so I started googling time dilation and pilots. I stumbled on a few different pages that discuss the whole clock experiment and pilots aging. Evidently all moving clocks, including our own internal clocks, run slow. But the results are usually negligible. Also there are alot of astro-physics dudes who think the best, most accurate equations are the ones that treat time as non-existent. I understood very very little of what I read. They all included really big scary math problems. So, I am conceding to my ignorance on the subject. But! I do know that regardless of time's real-or-not existence, we're losing an hour tonight so don't forget to set your clocks an hour ahead!

_________________
"I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally
I write till sleep comes."

Aw we're not

Okay, I've been doing more thinking and here are my thoughts (for now )

Time doesn't exist in any form, the universe just goes on. Time is a definition we created to track our place in existance. Therefore time is and isn't real.

It is not a thing that can be manipulated; but it is real enough for us to base our lives and history around.

Also back to the faster than speed of light theory for time travel. I was thinking if you did get that speed surely you'd just be travelling faster than light, rather than backwards in time. Say a light source took 3 weeks to get here; all that would happen is you'd get to that light source in less than 3 weeks :S I can't figure out how anywhere time travel would be possible.

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Distant bonfire smoke with a hint of cinnamon; that's the smell of adventure

Well, I'll just add in my own two cents really quick: I'm a nondenominational Christian (which means I believe God is there and I believe Jesus lived and that's about it. I don't think we're all going to hell or all that jazz, because, frankly, with how I've lived my life and am going to continue living it, I'd be screwed).

But I thought I'd add that I agree with Katasaki when he said "Time is merely a measurement has applied to the world so we can understand "when" we are." What I'm trying to say is that God may have invented this retarded schedule we have, but "time" the verb and adjective and noun, were utilized by man simply trying to CONTROL something--in this case, time. That's pretty much what we are constantly trying to do: control speech, crops, lives, transportation. And we are becoming more and more controlling OF it.

For example, thousands of years ago when we would meet with people, we'd say "evening" or "morning", so that any time we wanted we could show up. We progressed to saying hours eventually, but if one of us went back in time and someone asked "what time is it?" and we said "5:15" they would think us strange for including so inane a fact as the minutes. However, we have slowly progressed from "Meet me sometime in the hour of the five" to "I want to see you at 5:30 sharp".

Sorry, I just like being nosy, and I thought you should know that even though one believes in God, this is just us not being able to relax and having to try to control something. It makes us seem rather petty (take the March Hare's "Time! Time! Whose got the time?") but it's pretty much how I see it.

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As a great man once said,
There’s nothing more powerful
Than an idea
Who’s time
Has come.

- Saul Williams