Yes,

But like I said, it is measured within time.

I am not trying to make something out of nothing.

We have no way to measure time without using time as the measure.

That would be like taking a stick, drawing lines on it and saying it is a foot. There is nothing to ensure that time flows consistently. What makes a second a second other than our say so?

Everything you pointed out, while it all sounds concrete, exists within time.

would you agree with that?

Something I've always pondered is the ever increasing size and acceleration of our universe.

If... Like scientists suggest, our universe is accelerating in it's expansion since the "big bang", what's the comparison of time thoundsands of years ago to today's near light-speed expansion?

Someone or something that existed in that time would see no difference, right?

That would be the theory.

I guess what made me think of this in the first place is relativity.

There are two twin brothers. On their thirtieth birthday, one of the brothers goes on a space journey in a superfast rocket that travels at 99% of the speed of light. The space traveller stays on his journey for precisely one year, whereupon he returns to Earth on his 31st birthday. On Earth, however, seven years have elapsed, so his twin brother is 37 years old at the time of his arrival. This is due to the fact that time is stretched by factor 7 at approx. 99% of the speed of light, which means that in the space traveller’s reference frame, one year is equivalent to seven years on earth. Yet, time appears to have passed normally to both brothers, i.e. both still need five minutes to shave each morning in their respective reference frame.

http://www.thebigview.com/spacetime/timedilation.html

If time is constant, how can this be true.

Yes, there is a formula to show this. But obviously time is NOT moving at the same rate for both brothers.

Doesn't this prove that time is not a constant?

I read in another website that time is a measure of rate at which things change. Therefore before the Big Bang, time did not exist because no matter existed to change.

My ponderings have more to do with the size of ancient plant and animal life.

Do the geologists factor in the time-reference formula when dating objects?
Does heat factor into the equation?
What if time is not relative to speed, but instead it's a state of mind? Perhaps even a "collective" state of mind...

Right!

Now were getting somewhere...

How would the size of prehistoric animals and plants have anything to do with time. I don't see the connection...

According to your 7x formula, it's possible that prehistoric life lived 7 times longer than today if not more...

By today's standard, they'd live to be a lot older relative to their own "time".

time is relative as described in special relativity and
the Lorentz transformation

Yes, but my point is - that presupposes that time moves at a continuous rate.

What if it doesn't?

How does it affect the formula?

I am still waiting for someone to find proof that time moves at a constant rate without using something that is dependent on time.

Time it takes light to reach us from a star

Time it takes for a clock to tick

Time it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun

Time it takes for the moon to rotate around the earth.

See where I'm going with this?



I thought of something awhile ago. Everything you see in every day is seeing where something was in the past. Granted, with the speed of light were talking nanoseconds but it is still in the past. When you look at the moon, you see where it was just over one second earlier. When you look at the sun, you see where it was 8 minutes earlier.

But, Just the fact this formula shows that the faster you go the slower time moves. But not your perception of it, actual time itself. Which as a matter of course proves time can fluctuate. The the formula that assumes time is a constant, proves it is not. Why would it be that only velocity can affect the flow of time?

If traveling close to the speed of light will significantly slow down time, wouldn't that mean time moves at a different pace on each planet in our solar system? Every planet orbits the sun at a different rate. The velocity of that difference must be taken into account. Not to mention the solar system orbiting the galaxy.

I guess in this case, time is relative to where you are.

I wonder, if this is true we should be able to show it on our own planet.

Put a clock at the top of Mount Everest. Put an identical clock at the base. The top of the mountain is rotating at a slightly faster rate. After enough time has elapsed, you should see the clock at the top a few seconds behind the one at the base.

If that is true, it proves my point. Time fluctuates. But even then, why is it velocity is the only thing that affects time?

Remember, relativity is a theory, not a fact. It just hasn't been proven right or wrong. All the testing has shown it to be true so far, but that doesn't prove it to be correct.

It's a man made illusion...

it is as elastic or as rigid as you choose it to be...only the human animus would be so ridiculous as to have to invent such a nonsensical confining restraint on themselves.

what the formula says above is that time is not measured
at an always regular constant rate....



it is as inadequate as any description humankind comes
up with

but that does mot change what time is

time is a unit of measure. it's pretty much that simple

It measures how many suns and moons have risen and set, how many years have passed and we have organised these measures into relatively complex, but simple, calendar days, years, minutes etc, again based on the rotation of the earth around the sun. and did so fairly early in recorded history, late in geological history

That would be measurements based on observed time...

IN a realitivity environment where light has a constant and the observer rate-of-movement within that relitive environment is well below the measured rate-of-movement of a photon.

Once the observer 'accelerates' to a rate-of-movement close to that of the photon time becomes a different thing entirely to an obvserver that is still locked in the slower rate-of-movement.

Your asking for a special frame of reference outside of time. In what way would this solve your problem of being able to measure time?

What standard of time would this outside of time frame have that the inside of time frame did not?

It might seem like a very novel idea but its actually very old. Einstein pondered this . . . . the final take away was that there could be no special frame of reference. All frames are relative, and you need two frames to make sense of movement through space. Without time you have no movement, without movement you have no time.

What does it even mean to say, "outside of time"? Outside of change? Outside of movement? Its my understanding that these things cannot exist independent. There is no outside of time.

What if....
You froze time for a few seconds...a few hours...a hundred years...
would you age while time was frozen? How would you know how long time was frozen?

It comes back to perception again... to those that were frozen you would have aged a hundred years instantly but to you and say your friend who bravely volunteered for this mission with you, you would have aged in normal time.

I think what you are saying about time is like the train explanation of Einsteins theory of relativity.
If you are on a train going at a certain speed and the train next to you is going the exact same speed, then when you observe a passenger in the other train they do not appear to be moving. But if you are standing on the platform observing that same passenger they are moving.
So since we can't stand on the platform of time we can't observe if it is fluctuating.

The problem with any other theory of time is not that time is constant, but that the speed of light is constant.

The problem is that light remains heading away from you at the speed of light even if you are traveling after it at half the speed of light.

This is the FACT that must be explained by any rival theory . . . This is the fact that requires time dilation for a consistent reality. Spacetime is the natural evolution of the idea and explains so much about what we observe regarding light, time and space that a rival theory would have to explain even better.

The book I read that was written by Einstien was titled 'General and Special Relativity'.

If you were moving at our near the speed of light... And I was not... time would measure as it allways did for you. But if I was attempting to measure your time it would appear quite different to me.

A couple people have said now that time is a measure of movement and vice-versa.

So, two questions.

Does that mean if we can reach absolute zero that time stops for that event?

Does that mean it is impossible to reach absolute zero?

What happens to a Lorentz transformation when it becomes a Lorentz/Fitzgerald contraction.

Yup, no arguments here . . at least two frames to make sense of movement.

No movement, hmm that gets tricky. That would include atomic movement, and once you get down to the quantum scale things start to change a bit. Its held that some times time moves backward, sometimes forward, sometimes particles appear to disappear entirely only to reappear later. The fact remains that we have much data about phenomena at the quantum level, and many mathematical constructs to help us deal with this phenomena, even some that give very good (accurate) results, however we still do not have good explanations for WHY these strange phenomena occur. ie the ontology of quantum particle interactions is not fully understood.

The reality is that no one knows, many amazingly bright physicists have asked similar questions, and many end up saying things like . . . probably not, as an answer.

Most of the pro's I go to for answers would say that at the quantum level you will always have a small chance of a quantum fluctuation that would cause a particle to move, or energy to transfer, or for matter or energy to transform . . . ect ect ect. All of these events would require time to occur within. However I have read some interesting theories that explain time at the instant of the big bang as more of a binary system of quantum fluctuations and not a linear progression. Its not tested hard science however and so still IMHO falls under the "we do not know" category like much of what has been discussed in this thread.

In the situations you describe, the change in our perception of the rate of time is entirely in our perception, not in the rate of time. We can determine this using atomic clocks.




We can measure variations in the flow of time in different circumstances/regions, compared to other circumstances/regions.

If you are suggesting that the rate of time might occasionally flow at different (but uniform) rates for the entire universe - that seems like a useless line of reasoning to me, as we would never know and it would have no effect on anything occurring within the universe at all, ever. I'm not sure the concept is even valid. It certainly wouldn't effect our perception; if time 'slowed down' for the clock on the wall, it would equally 'slow down' for the activities of our nervous system, and we would have no idea.