Do you think time is cyclical or linear?

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.

Badly Drunk Boy

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?

Are you facing the front or back of the train?

kneemos

circadian wrote: »

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.

If it's infinite how does it fit inside another universe?

sbsquarepants

kneemos wrote: »

If it's infinite how does it fit inside another universe?

The set of numbers between 2 and 3 is infinite, but it fits inside the set of numbers between 1 and 4.

Donald Trump

sbsquarepants wrote: »

kneemos wrote: »

If it's infinite how does it fit inside another universe?

The set of numbers between 2 and 3 is infinite, but it fits inside the set of numbers between 1 and 4.

It is also uncountable. 

Take that Neeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrdddddddddddsssssssssss