Quote:
Originally Posted by AnssiH
I tried to bring that up earlier because the validity of relativity implies many rather different ontologies on time than would otherwise be seen reasonable at all. It would be healthy to see how these different ontologies are also self-coherent sets of definitions by themselves.
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I do believe this could be useful in better understanding time. Let's deal with a specific example and see if more than one understanding of time is possible to fully (and simply) describe the example.
Let's say Sally is in the center of a carousel (merry-go-round). Tommy is on the perimeter of the carousel and it is spinning at relativistic speeds. The ontology of the situation is as such:
Tommy repeats the same three dimensional path repetitively. Knowing his radius from the center of the carousel, it's possible to describe his location with an angle
. But, tommy is not always at the same position. We must describe his change in position. In other words, he has a velocity:
I believe it is necessary to write velocity in this way - with a dT. Some people want to say velocity can be "change in position" without a dT. But, that doesn't work, as is illustrated in this situation where Tommy is repeating the same position every revolution, is he repeating the same time? No. Tommy ages with T - not with position. If time were nothing more than change in position then we could mathematically define Tommy's age with nothing more than the angle. As the angle changed, so would his age. But he doesn't repeat the same age over and over with his position so we need this concept T (whatever it is).
To drive this point home we add Sally to the mix and an experimentally validated equation:
comparing Sally's T which we call
to Tommy's T. This tells us that Sally ages faster than Tommy. This is not an effect of observation. This is something that ontologically happens. Sally may age 10 years on this carousel while Tommy only ages one month.
My idea of time would be the concept that needs to be added to the above situation to fully describe what's happening. It's written as T and we call it time. However, you are claiming that there are multiple self-consistent ontologies of time that describe
T here. I wonder if you can give a couple examples.
~modest
