Science Forums 2

[modest]

Originally Posted by freeztar

Ohhh, very cool, I like it!

The opposite seems just as true. We can not experience what we can not touch.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that based on the above, time is either something intangable, in which case we can not experience it; or, time is tangeable and we do experience it.

Interesting, but I think I used the wrong word when I said "things touching us". For example, if the sun suddenly vanished (Impossible, but stick with me) then we wouldn't see it happen for 8 minutes as it takes 8 minutes for the light to reach us. Similarly, earth's orbit around the sun wouldn't change until 8 minutes after the sun vanished. We can't touch gravity (presumably), but we still can't experience it at any given moment if we are spatially separated from "it". So, it's not really tangible/intangible I'm thinking, but rather what fundamental purpose time serves in our universe.

I might get some resistance by putting this in the language of physics, but I think it's best described with a lightcone:



described on wikipedia where the "hypersurface of the present" is outside our past light cone and therefore we do not experience it - we have no direct knowledge of it. I think this implies quite a bit about the workings of time and space. In particular, how our experience is limited to events not spatially separated from us. The further an event is spatially distant from us, the further in the past that event must be.

It's not hard to then conclude that without time, objects in space could have no notion of spatial separation. Everything would be an island with no meaningful notion of the rest of the universe. I don't think you need geometry to make that conclusion. As we're trying to make as few assumptions as possible, I think it's worth noting that our experience of things alone imply this relationship between space and time.

~modest