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By Wellsy
#15048465
I’ve not thought about it but always had a crude view that time couldn’t be considered an independent abstraction but was a distinct bur dependent part of motion of bodies. That time effecting things doesn’t make as much sense to me as change being the nature of things and we have made quantities out of such regular motions.

So what is time and what is the case to be made for the different views of it?
#15048468
Wellsy wrote:I’ve not thought about it but always had a crude view that time couldn’t be considered an independent abstraction but was a distinct bur dependent part of motion of bodies. That time effecting things doesn’t make as much sense to me as change being the nature of things and we have made quantities out of such regular motions.

So what is time and what is the case to be made for the different views of it?

Time effects nothing. Time does nothing. It is merely a post-hoc metric, derived from our observations of objects moving and interacting with each other. In Kantian terms, time is a transcendental abstraction, one of what he called our "forms of thought".
By late
#15048471
Wellsy wrote:
I’ve not thought about it but always had a crude view that time couldn’t be considered an independent abstraction but was a distinct bur dependent part of motion of bodies. That time effecting things doesn’t make as much sense to me as change being the nature of things and we have made quantities out of such regular motions.

So what is time and what is the case to be made for the different views of it?



Physics often doesn't understand the why. They are kept plenty busy trying to capture the what.

You are right, of course, we create a fictional linear version of time because it's extremely useful. But now that we know Space-Time is wildly variable, time isn't the way we act like it is.

The way I look at it is that Space-Time says that Space isn't a constant, either. And that those fluctuations also alter time. IOW, in Space-Time, Space is the important bit. Time is a variable that will change in tandem with changes in Space.

Like in a Black Hole where Space collapses and time stops.

I'm still drinking my first cuppa tea. This is way too serious for first thing in the morning. Back to the frivolity of politics.. :D
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By Wellsy
#15048474
Potemkin wrote:Time effects nothing. Time does nothing. It is merely a post-hoc metric, derived from our observations of objects moving and interacting with each other. In Kantian terms, time is a transcendental abstraction, one of what he called our "forms of thought".

Thats how I imagined it.
I’ve had people say time is what a clock measures and cant talk of motion through space without time such that when a clock breaks is can be wrong at measuring time. To which I said for much of the world isn’t time based in the rotation of the earth around the sun and the world itself through night and day? So whilst a clock may break, the quantities we’ve divided things up are also a reference to routine cycles. And that in the experiencing the flow of time tends to require experiencing routine changes. Would a day as 24 hours make sense for anyone if it didn’t correspond to the rotation of the earth through night and day?


I wonder if the different of opinion is based on ones tendency for idealism or materialism.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/broodsphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/08/21/time-as-abstraction/amp/
As i see people talk of time as effecting things when they seem to be talking about change/motion but this isn’t intuitive to me in that I make the natural world primary and our categories as derived from it even whilst we grasp reality through them.
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By Wellsy
#15048476
late wrote:I'm still drinking my first cuppa tea. This is way too serious for first thing in the morning. Back to the frivolity of politics.. :D

I am to, I just don’t find many slices of time to be on pofo actively these days. So i squeeze it in in the morning and late at night.
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By Potemkin
#15048481
late wrote:Physics often doesn't understand the why. They are kept plenty busy trying to capture the what.

You are right, of course, we create a fictional linear version of time because it's extremely useful. But now that we know Space-Time is wildly variable, time isn't the way we act like it is.

Indeed, and Albert Einstein became wildly famous precisely because he successfully challenged our everyday assumptions about both time and space.

The way I look at it is that Space-Time says that Space isn't a constant, either. And that those fluctuations also alter time. IOW, in Space-Time, Space is the important bit. Time is a variable that will change in tandem with changes in Space.

In the theory of relativity, neither space nor time are "the important bit". What Einstein demonstrated was the inseparability of time and space. Which is 'time' and which is 'space' can vary, depending on our perspective. Time and space are linked together in a 4-dimensional space-time manifold. How we divide that manifold up into 'time' or 'space' depends on our point of view.

Like in a Black Hole where Space collapses and time stops.

Not quite. What happens in the interior region of a black hole is that time and space swap places - you are being drawn inescapably towards the central singularity of the black hole, just as we are normally drawn inescapably into the future, but inside the black hole you are free to move backwards and forwards in what an external observer would call 'time'. The singularity itself, however, is where the theory of relativity breaks down. It predicts infinite quantities (of density and space-time curvature), so cannot be correct.

I'm still drinking my first cuppa tea. This is way too serious for first thing in the morning. Back to the frivolity of politics.. :D

:coffee:

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