Do you think time is cyclical or linear?

dd972

It's starting to feel more the former the more I look into it.

Beasty

I think time travels backwards, in a straight line - and I reckon there's no-one out there that can disprove that theory....

Duckworth_Luas

According to the clock on my wall time goes around in a circle. It also makes a ticking noise.

Ajsoprano

Time stands still everything else moves

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Cyclical or Linear time are mostly linked to religious or philosophical viewpoints. Personally I think it is a matter of Time being, fundamentally, linear with cycles along the way or that absolute physical time is linear but subjective time runs in cycles.

Ipso

Or a flat circle. And it has the best guitar solo of all time, and not comfortably numb.

kneemos

All I know it creates wrinkles,hair in places I've never noticed and blurred images.

Pat Mustard

Hypothetically, if Einstein-Rosen bridges (wormholes) exist, it might be possible to send something backwards or forwards in time. If that were true, time would not be fully linear. I think.



https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html

zuutroy

Absolute time doesn't exist.

Beasty

Chelsea Faint Visa wrote: »

with cycles along the way or that absolute physical time is linear but subjective time runs in cycles.

That's good. I likes cycles :pac:

Beasty

zuutroy wrote: »

Absolute time doesn't exist.

Absolutely!

Death created time to grow the things that it would kill.

endacl

Subjective time is linear, and that’s good enough for me.

Beasty

OK, if you want the definitive answer look towards Bowie:

Time, he flexes like a whore
Falls w@nking to the floor
His trick is you and me, boy


Sounds like it's neither straight nor circular to me...

MilesMorales1

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

legrand

Per OPs original question..

cyclical for me

Chancer3001

time doesnt exist.

we just made it up to make keeping track easier

Atoms for Peace

"The Primary Universe is fraught with great peril. War, plague, famine and natural disaster are common. Death
comes to us all.
The Fourth Dimension of Time is a stable construct, though it is not impenetrable.Incidents when the fabric of the Fourth Dimension becomes corrupted are incredibly rare.
If a Tangent Universe occurs, it will be highly unstable, sustaining itself for no longer than several weeks.Eventually it will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all
existence."
-Roberta Sparrow (THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIME TRAVEL)

pleas advice

time flies like an arrow,

fruit flies like a banana

Samuel T. Cogley

It's starting to feel more the former the more I look into it.

pleas advice

I think time travels backwards, in a straight line - and I reckon there's no-one out there that can disprove that theory....

kneemos

It's a wave pattern.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

pleas advice wrote: »

I think time travels backwards, in a straight line - and I reckon there's no-one out there that can disprove that theory....

Theories must be: consistent, parsimonious, correctable, empirically testable/verifiable, useful, and progressive


Yours fails in at least one criteria.

Beasty

kneemos wrote: »

It's a wave pattern.

Beasty

Chelsea Faint Visa wrote: »

Theories must be: consistent, parsimonious, correctable, empirically testable/verifiable, useful, and progressive


Yours fails in at least one criteria.

You are assuming the rules of science, as you believe you know them, are valid. None of us know - we may all be puppets - everything may be pre-ordained under a set of rules we will never know about let alone understand

I, for one, subscribe to pleas advice's theory, with the addition of the number 42. Again I have no way of verifying or discounting this potential outcome...

Samuel T. Cogley

It's starting to feel more the former the more I look into it.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Beasty wrote: »

You are assuming the rules of science, as you believe you know them, are valid. None of us know - we may all be puppets - everything may be pre-ordained under a set of rules we will never know about let alone understand

I, for one, subscribe to pleas advice's theory, with the addition of the number 42. Again I have no way of verifying or discounting this potential outcome...

Many the religion has been based on less solid theology.

Praise the prophet pleas advice and his venerable acolyte Beasty.

kneemos

Does time travel slower for those on the equator because they're travelling faster?
Suppose I take a high speed train to work every morning. Do I age less than someone who walks?

Beasty

kneemos wrote: »

Does time travel slower for those on the equator because they're travelling faster?
Suppose I take a high speed train to work every morning. Do I age less than someone who walks?

That's what Einstein thought - at the end of the day he did not use it to his own advantage! Of course, it's all relative;)

But yes - that should happen, but the impact is probably so small to be unmeasurable

mickrock

The circle of life applies to life in general.

Your own personal life is like a straight line that ends abruptly. Horray!

Four Phucs Ache

I was going to post what I think about time but my head melted and I hit clear text.

FizzleSticks

This post has been deleted.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Some aboriginal tribes believe the future is behind and the past in front - as you can't see behind you (or the future) but you are aware of what is in front of you (as you are aware lf the past).

kumate_champ07

everything that will happen has happened already

Capt'n Midnight

Chelsea Faint Visa wrote: »

Some aboriginal tribes believe the future is behind and the past in front - as you can't see behind you (or the future) but you are aware of what is in front of you (as you are aware lf the past).

Some Native Americans too IIRC

makes sense really

The_Valeyard

Possible its both, or even a third way our simple minds cannot yet comprehend.

Capt'n Midnight

The_Valeyard wrote: »

Possible its both, or even a third way our simple minds cannot yet comprehend.

The equations for time use complex numbers when you get close to the Big Bang, or at least some of them , perhaps.

GreeBo

Beasty wrote: »

I think time travels backwards, in a straight line - and I reckon there's no-one out there that can disprove that theory....

Troll!

Richard Hillman

I think before the big bang and on the other reaches of the space where the big bang has yet to hit, time is liquid. There is no beginning and end, it's just in a liquid state, readying itself to become motionized. It's hard for us to contemplate a scenario where time is liquid, just like it was hard for us to contemplate a no gravity scenario before we understood that.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Richard Hillman wrote: »

I think before the big bang and on the other reaches of the space where the big bang has yet to hit, time is liquid. There is no beginning and end, it's just in a liquid state, readying itself to become motionized. It's hard for us to contemplate a scenario where time is liquid, just like it was hard for us to contemplate a no gravity scenario before we understood that.

Stephen Hawking disagrees with that. In his lecture "The beginning of time" he is adamant that time only began with the big bang.

Dravokivich

It's a unit of measurement. Much like the cubit. It started off quite primitively and we've learned to adjust our perception of the unit the more we've come to know of it. Just as we've redefined our units for length. I reckon we could easily overdo answering the question, trying to understand more than there is, continually expecting something to be more complicated than we've come to know it as. But then again, progress has been due to such questions... am I being cyclical?

Richard Hillman

Chelsea Faint Visa wrote: »

Stephen Hawking disagrees with that. In his lecture "The beginning of time" he is adamant that time only began with the big bang.

Yes, time as we know it. But before that time as we know it was non existent. We see time like a ruler, a start and an end. Time before us was like melting the ruler into a liquid. It's just not comprehendable to us, just Random spots of no structure.

Time began with the big bang, before that was an uncomprehendable mess. Kinda like Interstellar or Inception. Everything that is just indefinable.

Arcade_Tryer

Cynical.

Time is such a complex subject to think about. The way I think of it is this.

Subjectively, on a day to day basis, time can seem cyclical because we have circardian rhythms due to our ancestors having evolved on this planet with the same day and night cycles as we experience. It feels like there is something pre-ordained and cyclical about the way night follows day follows night, year follows year etc. but this is just a consequence of our planet having the characteristics it has. In reality each of us a living process unfolds linearly from conception until death, with our cyclical circardian rhythms being a feature of that linearly-unfolding process.

The objective nature of time is counterintuitive to us as it slows down or speeds up depending on how close the point of time-measurement is to a gravity source, or how quickly the point of time measurement is moving relative to other points.

Time at scales relevant to us moves almost totally linearly, if conditions of speed and gravity are kept constant. It doesn't move totally linearly though because at extremely minute scales time can go backwards for brief instants but overall time moves forward because since the big bang entropy has caused events to unfold in one direction ie. becoming more disordered.

Beasty

So next question - is time continuous? Heard a rumour that it's granular - that you cannot measure time periods of less than 10^(-43)s, as that's (approximately) the shortest time that exists, and that we stutter through life with 10^43 increments every second...

Beasty

Beasty wrote: »

So next question - is time continuous? Heard a rumour that it's granular - that you cannot measure time periods of less than 10^(-43)s, as that's (approximately) the shortest time that exists, and that we stutter through life with 10^43 increments every second...

For our purposes, it might as well be continuous!

Capt'n Midnight

Each second is 9,192,631,770 transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium 133 atoms.

Then again our best clocks can measure the time dilation caused by moving such a strontium clock 20mm further out of the bottom of the gravity well we live in.

_Brian

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Each second is 9,192,631,770 transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium 133 atoms.

Then again our best clocks can measure the time dilation caused by moving such a strontium clock 20mm further out of the bottom of the gravity well we live in.

There was a cook coo clock in our house when I was young, I think it was similarly complex to that.

The_Valeyard

Richard Hillman wrote: »

Yes, time as we know it. But before that time as we know it was non existent. We see time like a ruler, a start and an end. Time before us was like melting the ruler into a liquid. It's just not comprehendable to us, just Random spots of no structure.

Time began with the big bang, before that was an uncomprehendable mess. Kinda like Interstellar or Inception. Everything that is just indefinable.

Unless it wasnt the first Big Bang, but part of a timing cycle where the universe is created and destroyed in a never ending loop.

sbsquarepants

I was reading a thing about time the other day. Some physicist (can't remember his name so lets call him Professor Timebloke) any way Professor Timebloke reckons that time is slowing down, or else is possibly in the process of morphing into another dimension. We experience this at the moment by observing the movement of far away galaxies, we know they are moving away and they appear to be speeding up, we can tell this from the degree to which their light is red shifted, but no one knows quite why or how, so we have this fudge theory to explain it - "dark energy", ie something that we haven't yet discovered but which is powerful enough to move entire galaxies at enormous speeds, basically two thirds of all the energy in the universe would have to take this form to make the sums work.
According to our old friend Professor Timebloke, we would see the exact same thing if time itself was slowing, it's not that the galaxies are accelerating at all, they are moving at the same speed, it's that time itself is moving slower making them appear as if they've moved further in the same time.
A handy bonus of this theory is that it removes the need for this mysterious dark energy.... and probably provides the basis for a good movie somewhere along the line!

circadian

Time is a human construct. It's how we measure the effects of gravity and our own life cycles. The rest of the universe doesn't give a toss about time as we perceive it.

The universe, in my opinion, is infinite. It has no beginning and no end. It's possible our universe exists within another and so on.

I think the concept of infinity goes against the general human condition. Mortality, a beginning and an end to our lives so everything must have a beginning and an end.

Then there's simulation theory which is gaining traction.