Does Time Exist?

[Cosmic Trigger]

Only time exists, space does not exist. How do I know? I saw it on a youtube video.

 

[vortech]

That it's said, we are the Universe/Omniverse experiencing itself is another avenue of the paradox. The Tao is helpful, I find looking at this.

The tango of these ideas gets somewhere for me, when I have an experience/idea that matches up with another's, as when these perspectives line up, it shows me something is interestingly similar is going on. This happens so often that I find repeated significance. Everything is taking part in energy & it's presence, we seem to be a different level or manner of it for sure...what this means in the end, is mystery... Sentience is a key item in the equation, if that's the best way to put it.

Thank you Shamandrums for taking the thought experience in that new direction (Also, the Tao keeps finding me recently. Apparently there's a book called The Tao of Time: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_tao_of_time.html?id=ZD1N8v6948YC ).

Time is a construct of the human mind, and I'm not sure if any other animals see time as an actual thing. They just see things change, their instincts guide them, and they do see some connections in how things repeat, they see relationship of events like Pavlov's dog. They don't think 'it's time to eat', they just get hungry and want to eat.
Anyone have anything to add about this? Because this ties into the next part of the thought experiment.

Think for a moment that we are the Universe experiencing itself, and the Universal mind links every atom in the vastness of space creating a sort of consciousness substrate, a computer running programs in a sense. And (a twist from my original answer) the tree does make a sound when it falls because the forest is alive observing it, experiencing the tree fall!

However it's not like a couple hydrogen atoms get together and decide they want a change so they hook up with an oxygen atom and find a party with billions of these threesome affairs take place. No, they fuse under specific conditions because they love to do it. Then they float up and become part of a rain cloud. I think atoms only feel 2 basic emotional states- Love: When they make a new connection and become part of something bigger, and Fear: when they are pulled apart from what they love. Or maybe it is only love, but if I was an oxygen atom I would hate being pulled apart from my pair of hydrogens. For instance the process of taking water and splitting the hydrogen off in a fuel cell is described as a 'violent' reaction. Fuel cells are so hard to make because of the incredibly high-energy reaction required to pull love apart. It's not like it's a bad thing though, I would guess atoms only feel fear for a single oscillation (and that's all time is to an atom, relative to its oscillations) then they quickly find new life to become part of, because the entire Universe is consciousness.
End of time-consuning rant. Apologies for not being able to get those couple minutes back.

 

[MocCozmiK]

It exists because people identify themselves with their body. They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. In fact,consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.
Everything we do or eventually do becomes known and will be defined and utilized within this frame of existence, which has no logical understanding in real time.

I'm not even sure anymore, if I know what "time" really is. It has a different meaning for different people. How do we define such a place that we exist in, if only momentarily and yet cannot really say that it is exists until it has happened. We cannot pinpoint it but yet we exist in it continuously. (this probably makes no sense to most, because I have a difficult putting my feelings about this subject into words)

Right now is a moment and the existence that is happening, it continues on in a line until we live out a sequence of moments that we then see and label as the past. The moments that are to come then are defined as the future.

Time exist here on earth. Once our journey here is over, and we move on to our next destination, if time exist in that place, I don't know..

If time is precious and valuable then it looks like most of us are in trouble, because we seem to spend it like we have no regard for it whatsoever - I'm speaking for myself personally.

I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. Took me a while to move forward and let go of the past. What a waste that was.
But hell, I learned. And I am a better human being for it now.

They say time heals all... If time actually doesn't exist then that saying really blows...

 

[vortech]

Time wouldn't be the second-most sung about subject in music if it wasn't the biggest reference point of consciousness outside of space itself...And musicians know what's up in my opinion, so we could probably learn as much about time in their lyrics as we could describe in this thread. So MocCozmik your points are all valid, and it is a very human way of looking at the subject.

Going back to my original post in this thread, I'm more or less tired of the circular philosophical debates regarding the 'existence' of time because to be fair it both exists and doesn't exist, and those are the hardest philosophical problems to resolve because it is basically a quantum superposition, and what the fuck is that anyway?

 

[What 23]

Yep.

 

[Vagina Lover]

I'm not sure that people playing music is any different to a philosopher imaging stretching out an elastic or spools of tape.

The fact that we can only get an idea of our self through the eyes of others is enough proof for me that humans are temporary.

The atoms that make up our body can be traced back to the crucibles that cooked light atoms to heavy atoms at their core under extreme temperatures and pressures...

Stars, the high mass ones among them, which then exploded and spreaded their guts throughout the Galaxy.

Ingredients of these stars including carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and all the fundamentals for life itself.

Ingredients which became parts of gas clouds, which condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar system stars with planets orbiting, now containing the fundamentals of life.

There's a level of connectivity with the universe, which is beautiful, as we strive to feel relevant. As we strive to be a part of events and activities around us.

By being alive, we can sense time and space, and we form our own ideas of that based on our experiences with the universe and other humans.

If time did not exist, we would not exist.

 

[MocCozmiK]

Your post reminds me of one of my favorite quotes -

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
-Carl Sagan

 

[Vagina Lover]

Your post reminds me of one of my favorite quotes -

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
-Carl Sagan

That is also one of my favourite all time quotes.

Starstuff is what we are

 

[swilow]

I really like your post, vagina lover I think you really poignantly described the impression I too have. I find that outlook useful when the tedium, suffering and often drudgery of human life becomes overwhelming.

I think time or something like time certainly exists but could be largely a matter of interpreting events. Everything in the universe has a before moment and then a resulting moment and then further resulting moments (ad infinitum to the singularity- likely a misnomer) and I suppose we call this cause-and-effect. This a principle that concerns the material world but must take place in a sequential manner which implies a time-like phenomena, if only as a unit of measurement. From what science has gathered, there is no effect without cause. There is no simultaneity of cause/effect in a literal sense, it is always sequential. If it were not, we would not be able to derive anything reliably meaningful from our observations. This before/after moment does not seem to require human consciousness- it is inherent in the actions of objective phenomena such as radioactivity which occur regardless of observation with a cause always resulting in the same effect. The fact is that reality appears to flow in a connected movement, a homogenous and seamless wave that can be predictable (when talking about, say the dissipation of heat from an object) due to connected present-moment observations with initial values being different but related to proceeding values. It seems like has implications on the validity of the past and the fact of the coming future.

However, this may not be objective and the way we measure time could be a conceit. But, as a function of actual space, it becomes harder to call it imaginary. We measure it based on incredibly subjective references but the universe also exhibits a changing aspect which is predictable based on extrapolation from present moment references- there is a connection between a present state and the next, which can give us information about the past and the future. This makes me lean towards time (or something like it) existing.

Time could be running backwards and we are in an imploding universe... Could that explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up?

 

[belligerent drunk]

Time could be running backwards and we are in an imploding universe... Could that explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up?

Not sure what your logic behind this is, but the current hypothesis is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate due to energy in free space (dark energy).

 

[polymath]

I don't think that's true. Thermodynamic equilibrium is still dynamic, which means that the system would change between individual configurations, and said changes could be expressed as a function of time.

Hmm... This made me think about something. Is it possible to imagine a system in which the direction of time really has no meaning? Suppose we have a mole of ideal gas made of Newtonian point particles, enclosed in a cubic container of volume 1 m³, and the particles don't interact (collide) with each other but bounce elastically from the walls of the container.

If we knew the microstate (positions and velocities of all particles) of the system at any single moment of time, we could calculate what the microstate is at any other moment (either in the future or the past). Is it possible to assign the particles an initial position and velocity distribution in a way that the system's entropy would be strictly constant, never increasing or decreasing at any time? Or are there always tiny fluctuations in the value of entropy, unless the number of particles is infinite (thermodynamic limit)?

 

[Vagina Lover]

I'm fairly certain that with our current observational techniques, mathematics, and scientific methods, it is impossible to know both the position and velocity of a given particle at the same time. This is due to electrons and other subatomic particles existing in a wave-particle duality, so we can only speak of their positions in terms of probability when their velocity (energy state) is known.

See: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger's Cat

Hypothetically speaking, in perturbation theories, one can simulate the number of particles. But for a very large or infinite number of particles, the simulation becomes inaccurate.

The thermodynamic limit, as I learned it, is for a large number of particles, not an infinite number of particles.

For a finite number of particles, there will always be entropy fluctuations, but entropy is somewhat of a mystery with our level of science and mathematics.

 

[polymath]

^ I was not talking about a real-world system, but of a model system that obeys Newtonian mechanics (no quantum effects). The trajectories of a system of particles that do not interact with each other (as is the case here) can be solved no matter how many particles there are. If the particles are interacting, even the dynamics of a system of only three particles can't be solved analytically and methods such as perturbation theory have to be used.

EDIT: a little correction here... In some special cases you can even solve the dynamics of an infinite number of interacting particles analytically both in the classical and quantum case, but this mostly applies to interactions that obey Hooke's law, like in this one-dimensional lattice model.

 

[Jabberwocky]

If we knew the microstate (positions and velocities of all particles) of the system at any single moment of time, we could calculate what the microstate is at any other moment (either in the future or the past). Is it possible to assign the particles an initial position and velocity distribution in a way that the system's entropy would be strictly constant, never increasing or decreasing at any time? Or are there always tiny fluctuations in the value of entropy, unless the number of particles is infinite (thermodynamic limit)?

Questions like the one you're asking that led Boltzmann to postulate his famous definition of entropy which is the basis for statistical thermodynamics. His definition of the microstate is very different than how you are stating it. Yours is correct but there is a perfectly sensibly leap of abstraction if you will between a statistical thermodynamics point of view and from a classical point of view like you are describing.

To answer your question though, a perfect crystals with zero velocity (temperature) is an example where entropy isn't changing but that's trivial. A crystal of gold at O K has zero entropy as an idealized definition used in reference tables.

 

[swilow]

Is on my side yes it is.

 

[JessFR]

Time could be running backwards and we are in an imploding universe... Could that explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up?

I don't think so. But one fascinating but minority idea isn't too far off your line of thinking.

Basically the idea goes that rather than time running backwards, time might be slowing down. And that the expansion of the universe isn't actually speeding up, time is gradually slowing down making it look like the expansion of universe is inexplicably speeding up. Disturbingly were that the case time may eventually stop entirely.

Fortunately it's probably not the case, but it's a fascinating thought and a brilliant insight.

 

[polymath]

Questions like the one you're asking that led Boltzmann to postulate his famous definition of entropy which is the basis for statistical thermodynamics. His definition of the microstate is very different than how you are stating it. Yours is correct but there is a perfectly sensibly leap of abstraction if you will between a statistical thermodynamics point of view and from a classical point of view like you are describing.

To answer your question though, a perfect crystals with zero velocity (temperature) is an example where entropy isn't changing but that's trivial. A crystal of gold at O K has zero entropy as an idealized definition used in reference tables.

Yeah, thermodynamic entropy is a property of a macroscopic equilibrium state, and a macroscopic state always corresponds to a number of microstates. The number of microstates can be used to calculate the entropy of a macrostate in statistical mechanics.

The third law of thermodynamics states that a perfect crystal at absolute zero has zero entropy, and the knowledge of this can be used to calculate entropies at nonzero temperatures (without any mention of the microscopic nature of matter), given that we know the heat capacity data of the material down to low enough temperatures. The single quantum microstate corresponding to this zero-entropy macrostate is a crystal that is at the absolute quantum ground state.

The microstate in classical mechanics is given by specifying the coordinates and momenta of the constituent particles (a point in phase space). You can get a set of many microstates from this by propagating the Newtonian dynamics of the system towards very large values of t. If it's a real equilibrium state of an isolated system, you can calculate the entropy of this phase space trajectory which contains many microstates. However, related to the Poincare recurrence theorem, a system like this can have random fluctuations, that become significant when extremely large time intervals are considered. In the case of the point particle ideal gas in a cubic container, an extreme example of such a fluctuation would be a situation where all the particles are in the same half of the container at the same time by accident (of course we never see this happening in real world, because it would require observing the system for times much larger than the current age of our universe).

What I was thinking about, was whether there's a way to give the particles some initial coordinates and momenta in such a way, that there would be practically no such fluctuations, even when considering arbitrarily large time intervals.

We don't even need a physical system to play with these concepts. Think about a set of sine functions of the time variable, that have different phase velocities, e.g. Sin(t), Sin(at), Sin(a²t), Sin(a³t), ... , Sin(aⁿt). Here, a is some non-integer constant. Now, the phases of all these "oscillators" are zero at the initial moment: t=0. It seems appropriate to call this initial state a state of low entropy, isn't it? When the variable t increases, the phases of the oscillators soon get all kinds of values between [0,2Pi], and there's no simple correlation between them anymore. The system has gone to a state of "maximum entropy".

If, on the other hand, all of those sine functions has the same phase velocity, there would always be 100% correlation between the phases of the functions. This trivial example kind of corresponds to the zero-temperature crystal that has zero entropy.

My question is, can we assign the oscillators some phase velocities and initial phases in a way that there would never be "accidental" states of low entropy, either in the extremely distant past or the future.

 

[swilow]

I don't think so. But one fascinating but minority idea isn't too far off your line of thinking.

Basically the idea goes that rather than time running backwards, time might be slowing down. And that the expansion of the universe isn't actually speeding up, time is gradually slowing down making it look like the expansion of universe is inexplicably speeding up. Disturbingly were that the case time may eventually stop entirely.

Fortunately it's probably not the case, but it's a fascinating thought and a brilliant insight.

Indeed, that is interesting. In a sense, it is a true philosphical idea because both causes have the same effect and are basically indistinguishable. Either could be correct. I wonder if time stopped altogether, could that be a state prior to it then running backwards...

I am clearly a novice in this area, but if the universe is expanding, in what sense? Does it mean that the total area and volume of the universe is increasing?

 

[polymath]

^ The universe expands in such a way, that no matter where you are located in the universe, you always observe that the most distant stars you can see are moving away from you. The apparent area and volume of some object are dependent on the relative velocity of the observer, but every observer agrees with the fact the volume of the visible universe is increasing (unless the observer is a tachyon).

For a real philosophical question, consider the following: How can we know that there isn't really just one moment of existence, a moment that is "equipped" with a delusional perception that there has been a past and that there will be a future?

 

[Jabberwocky]

I enjoyed the though experiment, don't have a solution though polymath. You know your stuff, I experience it more like poetry these days. It's a beautiful thought, I think I get what you're saying, a pattern that is self perpetuating and always symmetrical with respect to its container no matter how many particles you add. It would be dynamic and harmonious with itself by the metric of disorder. I see waves too, but there's that whole duality again. Time would have no arrow. But now I've slipped into poetry. I see particles as holons these days in my minds eye which feels good to me. That's enough. Like a trip back to a time capsule this stuff, cobwebs and all. Take care.