the human concept of time...

[servantofGod]

what is time? does it exist? can time be real? is time just our way of breaking down eternity into a concept that our imagination can grasp? what are your thoughts? i'd like to know!

my personal tohughts...
time does exist, but not as we see it. who is to say that a minute has to be 60 seconds? what i derive from this question is that nobody has any real concept of time, because we cannot imagine an eternity. also, an eternity cannot exist. there is a past, present, and future, but only the present truely exists. only the moment in which we are living our lives truely exists. the past is gone forever, except for the moments that can be brought back through memories. the present is the only time that "physically exists". the future as yet to come, and can only be guessed and second guessed.

well, in as few words as i can make it, those are my thoughts. please post yours.

[Freethinker]

Originally posted by: servantofGod
what is time? does it exist? can time be real? is time just our way of breaking down eternity into a concept that our imagination can grasp? what are your thoughts? i'd like to know!

Ah, your ready to jump in with your own thread. Way to go.

time does exist, but not as we see it.

My first guess would be that you do not understand General Relativity. You seem stuck in Special Relativity, where time is a stand alone element. In General Relativity, time is just the 4th dimension, as directly relative to each person individually as the other 3, and integral to them. Thus the time/space continuum.

who is to say that a minute has to be 60 seconds?

You are confusing our delineation of time metrics with time itself as a dimension. Yes the length of and how many units are arbitrary. I was watching SG1 last night. I don;t watch it often so i don;t remember the charector's name. He is the big dark guy with the swirly mark on his forehead. Not an earthing. They were talking about birthdays. He said he does not celebrate birthdays, but that his was coming in 45 days. Now how would he relate his planet's time frame to earths that readily? Imagine how much calculating would be needed to determine his 101st b'day when the chances of two different planets having the same solar rotation when someone does not normally track such things.

what i derive from this question is that nobody has any real concept of time, because we cannot imagine an eternity.

Although it is always subject to change, as all things in science are, at this point we have a fairly good idea of what time as a dimension is RE General Relativity and a curved space/ time. That is how time functions as one of the 4 dimensions.

also, an eternity cannot exist. there is a past, present, and future, but only the present truely exists. only the moment in which we are living our lives truely exists. the past is gone forever, except for the moments that can be brought back through memories. the present is the only time that "physically exists". the future as yet to come, and can only be guessed and second guessed.

Do some research into General Relativity and you will see how this forces yoou to change your concept completely.

e.g. what is the "present". What is it relative to someone else's "present"? If you are on a hill top some miles away from a friend and they turn on a light, they will experience THEIR "present" before you will. At some future time, you will experience their "present". It will be your "present" even though to them it is the past.

only the moment in which we are living our lives truely exists. the past is gone forever,

Yet that ONE moment exsisted at TWO DIFFERENT times based on their and later your perception. Which TIME is the ONLY one? Was YOUR "present" any less real because you experienced it AFTER they did?

[cookyman]

freethinker. wen u said that the two people would be experiencing each others future past and present u are slightly wrong in a way. the people would be seeing the light at different times but they are only exeriencing eachothers future past and present visually but effectivly they are experiencing the event at exactly the same time. it is only the light that is making it seem as thoughit is at different time periods. time doesn't travell at the speed of light but it is infinte effectivly. like when a star explodes or sumthing 100 million light years away we don't see that happening untill 100 million years affter it happened but we arn't experienceing that stars present 100 million years later, we are just seeing the affects of the star blowing up but it actually happened ages ago... bit repeditive there but i proved my point... lol

Cookyman

[Freethinker]

Originally posted by: cookyman
freethinker. wen u said that the two people would be experiencing each others future past and present u are slightly wrong in a way.

First let me make two qualifiers

1) there is no way anyone could provide a detailed enough desciption about General Relativity/ Time-space in these forums
2) I admit to a limited understanding of it myself.

But...

the people would be seeing the light at different times but they are only exeriencing eachothers future past and present visually

Different aspects of an event travel at different speeds. e.g. if there is an explosion some distance away, we would first experience the visual aspects, then sound/ impact and perhaps later hit by flying objects. Does that mean that each of these aspects are from DIFFERENT events? A person that was holding the bomb would experience all 3 at relatively the same instant.

Yet actually none of us "experience" an event as it is actually happening. Even if we are in physical contact at the event time, it takes a finite time for our sensory organs to relay the data and our brains to process it. We NEVER experience ANYTHING in "real time".

Event B happens AFTER event A. It would depend on where we are relative to the two events as to which is experienced when. There are points in time/ space that would allow us to experience A and B at the same time, A first, or B first. So GR suggests that the events, being part of a 4 dimension time/space are always relative to the position of the viewer. If we see a supernova that is 2 billion light years away, even though technically that "event" happened 2 billion years ago, in our time/sapce, we are experiencing it happen as it is happening.

but effectivly they are experiencing the event at exactly the same time.

Wrong. Each has their own special relative time compared to their space. But the GR space/time is a package of that event and is maintained for that event in and of itself. In the A, B example above, person C is "experiencing the event(s) at exactly the same time", while person D expereinces them at different times. This does not affect each event's time/space or each's relative to the others.

time doesn't travell at the speed of light

"Time" doesn't "travel". Time is a component of dimensional space.

[cookyman]

wen i posted that repsonse i worded it wrong. i shouldn't have said that they wereexperiencing the event at the same time. what i meant was that the event would be happening to the person at the same time as wen it happened but yes the sensory organs of the body would regiser that the event happened a varying period of time after the depending on the distancebettween the event and the person but efectivly the event would happen at exaclty the same time anywhere almost, just the effects of the event would be effecting the universe at different times due to the different speeds of light and sound.
sry bout that but i just needed to make myself clearer.

Cookyman