Quote:
Originally Posted by freeztar
You can't leave us hanging like that! What did they do about it?  |
Simply, they got themselves so freakin confused that they started telling each other that time, itself, was imaginary -- a mere arbitrary construct!
And they were wrong.
You see, time is real. That is,
non-simultaneity is real.
Which is to say, not all "events" are simultaneous with each other.
Wherever you are, some "events" will occur before (and after) other "events".
Embrace it.
Deal with it.
So, this "stuff" that separates non-simultaneous events, we call "time".
We track time with clocks, because clocks are designed to have internal events ("ticks") that are serial rather than simultaneous. The clocks count the ticks.
Now the word "time" is an arbitrary string of sounds.
The mathematical and geometric "coordinate systems" we devise to chart or plot events, and the "flow" of time, are also artifacts of our own devising. They're not really "arbitrary" because they must "behave" in a manner that is "congruent" to the way real events behave. Otherwise the coordinate systems would be useless.
And a lot of our concepts about time, whether or not it has only one direction, whether or not it can be slowed down or sped up, whether we can "go back in time" -- yeah, all that is pretty arbitrary and made up.
But time itself is real. You can't have a universe without it. You can't have a universe without change. Without serial change. Without non-simultaneous change.
The trouble is, time is just a word we devise, for a natural process that we cannot see or feel, or easily understand. And so the temptation to throw out the baby with the bath water and claim that time, too, is just an arbitrary construct of the Human mind.
Balderdash! That's just lazy thinking.
