Having just read a book called, the Langoliers, my brain is now completely fuddled by the notion of what happens to a place once time has moved through it.
I can't even get it straight in my own head what I am trying to work out...but I guess it is this...
Barring major catastrophe, I am pretty sure the next second, minute, five minutes etc will happen. In other words, I know my kitchen is in the future, just as I know it is in the past - I sat here in it having coffee ten minutes ago.
So as I sit here in my kitchen now, is the kitchen that I will be in in the next five minutes hovering, empty in time somewhere, and equally, is the 'old' kitchen from a second ago disappearing into a black hole or something?
Perhaps I am confused by trying to find a common ground between the physical and the non physical? I just cant seem to make sense though, of the idea that we are just moving through time as if we were on a conveyor belt, and this second is the only relevant time.
You lot are all so good at explaining woo, I hope someone can give me a good slap and tell me how to get a grip of myself.
PS
Reading too much Stephen King will do that to you!
Yes, just keep telling yourself that the story is not real, and then try to forget that you ever read it.
M.
And don't watch the truly awful TV adaptation. That's four or five hours of your time you won't get back.Originally Posted by Muttley
Yes, just keep telling yourself that the story is not real, and then try to forget that you ever read it.
M.
Didn't know there was a TV adaptation....have to say it was a great read though!
Time (as far as we currently understand it) is a dimension of the universe, as much as "up" and "left" is.
Whenever you move, you move through one of the accepted 3 dimensions of space, however, you also move through the 4th "time" dimension.
The curious thing is, on a quantum scale, all reactions are not time sensitive - that is, they can be run as easily backwards as they can forwards. Nobody quite understands why we only appear to perceive time as running in a one directional way.
The only exceptions to this are the Second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy must increase over time; the cosmological arrow of time, which points away from the Big Bang, and the radiative arrow of time, caused by light only travelling forwards in time.
Bulletin boards.
^ I do believe he's quite good looking as well...
Vbloke I mean. Tut
Last edited by wooo_oops; 17th October 2007 at 09:38 PM. Reason: Slow posting
Having just read a book called, the Langoliers, my brain is now completely fuddled by the notion of what happens to a place once time has moved through it.
Barring major catastrophe, I am pretty sure the next second, minute, five minutes etc will happen. In other words, I know my kitchen is in the future, just as I know it is in the past - I sat here in it having coffee ten minutes ago.
You lot are all so good at explaining woo, I hope someone can give me a good slap and tell me how to get a grip of myself.
PS
[ i] Yoda mode ON [ /i]
Study old Zen koan you must:
"Too much month at the end of the money, there is."
[ i] Yoda mode OFF[ /i]
The problem is that we really don't understand time at all. It seems to be a dimension similar to spacial dimensions, but it is also different. It seems to progress only in one direction, but there doesn't seem to be any good reason for this. As vbloke says, particle interactions should be exactly the same forwards and backwards in time, yet they only seem to go forwards. Even the "cosmological arrow" is just an illusion. It would be caused by light only traveling forwards in time, but there seems no good reason why this should be the case. In fact, certain "big crunch" hypotheses speculate that if the mass of the universe were big enough to reverse the expansion, time would reverse as well, which would mean we can't actually tell the difference between an expanding and contracting universe, since it would always appear to be going forwards in time from our point of view.
The only thing that seems to give any objective direction to time is entropy. A simple explanation would be to think of fission. Take an unstable atom and hit it with a neutron and it splits into, say, two smaller nuclei and three neutrons. This is fairly easy to do, since two things hitting each other is fairly common. Now imagine the reverse. We now have five particles all needing to hit each other at exactly the same time, which is incredibly unlikely to happen. Therefore, entropy always increases and time appears to progress in the direction of increasing entropy. However, while this gives a nice qualitative explanation, it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered from the physics point of view.
One nice attempt to solve this lies with phase space. This is a mathematical space where the points on a graph represent the state of a particle. For one particle, a two dimensional space can be drawn with position on one axis and momentum on the other. Whatever it's state, it can be represented by a single point on the graph. If you add another particle, you now need a four dimensional graph, but one point still represents the state of the whole system. If you keep adding particles, you end up with billions of dimensions to the graph, but now the state of the entire universe can be represented by a single point on it. The progress of time is now represented by the movement of that point around the phase space.
The initial problem with this idea was that it still doesn't actually explain time. The point can move around phase space, but there is no reason for it to travel in one direction rather than the reverse. This is where quantum physics comes in. It is not actually possible to know the momentum and position exactly at the same time, so the point for one particle becomes a fuzzy blob spread out a bit, representing the probability of the point actually being in any particular place. Scale this up to the whole universe and you get a really big, fuzzy blob that gives the probability of the universe being in any particular state. Time is now no longer the movement of the point in phase space, it is simply the probability that any particular state occurs. From a philosophical point of view this isn't especially satisfying, but from a physical point of view it is very possible that it explains pretty much everything.
As for the actual question in the OP, it depends how you actually look at time. If you look at it in the usual way of just another dimension that we move through then no, things only exist at one point in time. There isn't another room floating around 5 minutes into the future, the room will only be there once it has travelled through those 5 minutes, in the same way that your car isn't 5 miles ahead of you, it will only be there once it has travelled 5 miles. However, from the phase space point of view, all points in phase space potentially exist, so it isn't completely wrong to say that your room is hanging around in the future, waiting for its turn to be "reality".
Of course, there are many other ways of looking at time, and most of them end up with slightly different ways of looking at the past and the future. The most accurate thing to say is that we really don't know. However, as far as we can tell, it doesn't actually matter anyway. Time appears to be something that just proceeds from the past to the future, and so we may as well act as if that is the truth.
Scottish Girl - have you read The Time Traveller's Wife yet? Now there's a book which will mess up your head. Henry is 'chronologically-challenged' and finds it hard to stay in the 'present'. It's a glorious read.
If you haven't read it, here's a link to the book on Amazon
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travele...2700985&sr=8-1
but you can always note the isbn and order it by linking to amazon via UKS' bookstore.
And trust me, it's not just a chick-lit book. Boys like it too - and some have been known to cry at the ending...
Cuddles - is there any truth in the idea that an atomic clock flying round the planet in a jet will 'lose' time?
If so, how does this happen?
The Wiki acticle probably explains it better than I ever could.
According to Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, there isn't just one dimension of time, there are two. In his model of the universe there is one extra space and one extra time dimension. Oddly, this makes understanding the universe easier. It is a consequence of the inability to pin down the position and momentum of a particle at once. He says these two are actually linked in a guage symmetry (which is WHY you can only get one or the other). The result is a possible solution to the infamous problem of linking quantum mechanics and relativity.
Just thought you'd like to know ...
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