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Time To Pause And Ask A Question Of Relativity

Sid

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Nov 19, 2018
Messages
3,381
A Question. And something to think about that we all see, and use, yet take for granted every single day of our lives:

Is time only relative to the distance that it travels?
Or is it only relative to the point (the moment in time) at which it is observed?

For instance; think of a clock face. To measure a second; a minute, an hour, day, month, a year... a lifetime, all we have to do is observe how far a hand has moved around the clock face divisions to be able to "fix" the "correct time," or the amount of time that has passed.

On the other hand (no pun intended) at it's centre, the hands movement (relative travel) is hardly measurable, yet at the extreme edge - (the pointy bit) the distance travelled is greatly enlarged, yet it is the same hand moving through time at the same rate of travel, in the same moment of time and along the same movement of time, yet... the distance that the hand actually travels is considerably increased... yet totally relative within
the whole observable movement of the mechanism!
 
You are confusing things with angular momentum.
 
Thanks' for your reply 'Justified & Ancient.'
However, does 'angular momentum' fully explain the fact that the hand of a clock registers two different modes of time? One at it's fulcrum end (fixed - yet not fixed, because it is rotating with a slower movement, yet inescapably fixed to the faster movement of the end point - relative to the length of the hand), yet both movements of time are measurable in the same spacial time frame. (i.e. Two different (timed) movements in the same amount of time!) Confusing? Of course it is!
 
I asked a physicist.

We can’t really talk about a “point” of time, only intervals of time.


So we can say “To this observer, in this interval of time, this thing happened".

Even if you say something like “At 1:00pm the clock struck” as a point in time, it’s still a point in time that is referred to by an interval (ie an hour after 12).

It gets a bit freaky when you talk about two things happening at the same time in different locations, because in general, nobody else would observe them happening at the same time.
 
Hi escargot: Yes, I see what your physicist is getting at - but, a hand on a clock is a moment of time, a point of, or in time, when something of note happens/happened, a marker of a moment of the movement of time.
P.S. The Snail lays down a marker of the moment it passed - shell and all!
 
This thread makes me feel like I'm in one of those trains of thoughts I used to have when I was younger, where I'd start to think about how long a second takes and even by the time I say "now" it's no longer now because of the time that has passed since I started to say it etc.

Hypothetically speaking, (thinking of relativity, etc, and hopefully in keeping with the discussion) if two people were small enough (or, conversely, the clock was large enough) to sit on either end of said clock hand, how would they experience the minute passing? I want to say it would seem longer for the person sitting at the outer end of the hand (i.e. the part that moves the farthest).
 
The past is gone and unchangeable, the future unknowable.

There is only the eternal 'now'.

They would experience the same; particularly if they had their eyes closed.
 
Yes!!!

Someone said to me ages ago, that if the hand of a clock was long enough the tip would go faster then the speed of light.
I said it would fall off because it was so long.
They said that wasn't the point. It was a thought experiment.
 
reply to 'Newt,'
Ah, yes that's true it definitely would fall off, but that's' where gravity kicks in - you could say "it takes a hand in the proceedings!"
 
Lol.

Apparently it's like the Archimedes lever that moves the world. Theoretical only.
 
Lol.

Apparently it's like the Archimedes lever that moves the world. Theoretical only.

Anyway didn't Sir Clive Sinclair solve this issue of angular momentum/clock hands and gravity by giving us the digital watch?
 
A Question. And something to think about that we all see, and use, yet take for granted every single day of our lives:

Is time only relative to the distance that it travels?
Or is it only relative to the point (the moment in time) at which it is observed? ...

"The map is not the territory." - Korzybski

A clock is not any sort of direct manifestation of time flow. It is an artifact designed to operate in such a fashion as to aid one in measuring or marking points within the passage of 'time'.

In light of Korzybski's dictum, the clock is a sort of endlessly recycling map of time's passage, but it isn't time itself.

In Einsteinian / relativistic terms 'time' is not an object, nor is it a feature of an object. It is a component of the time-space coordinate matrix within which objects are manifest. As such 'time' does not travel. Objects (including points on a clock's hands) travel in terms of displacement within this time-space coordinate space.

Einstein predicted the effects of 'time' on a moving object can vary with that object's speed of movement within this time-space matrix. This doesn't imply that 'time' itself travels in any sense.
 
So, who are "they?"

They are the people referred to. One at one end of the clock hand, one at the other. This is complicated as the mass of the person at the periphery end will increase as his/her speed increases.

Then the whole thing becomes impossible as it would seem you could, with a long enough arm, reach the speed of light.

INT21.
 
So time doesn't travel, we travel within time.

A bit like ball bearings dropped in jelly.
 
Time, to me, is just the gap between two things happening. How you choose to measure it is up to you, and is usually related to your environment.

But I never considered it a 'dimension' as in 'time is the fourth dimension'.

INT21.
 
But there is no gap between things happening - it's a continuum!
 
But there is no gap between things happening - it's a continuum!

You can't describe something (X) as continuous (versus discontinuous) until and unless you accept the notion that X is "real" in some sense.

Your seemingly direct experience is actually indirect, being mediated by your neural equipment and how it functions.

The notion that there is a "real" linear coordinate dimension that has its own objective characteristics is, in effect, a fiction or figment of our human imaginations. It's a construct or orientation that simplifies our descriptions of and explanations for dynamic changes we perceive.

Our sensory perception and cognitive recognition of what's perceived is not, as it turns out, continuous at all. Your neural infrastructure is accepting, processing, depicting, and (for lack of a better term) "recording" your sensory experience in rapid cycles (multiple times per second). Your subjective impression (itself a product of the same set of neural infrastructure) is simplified into a sort of blurred continuity. This is analogous to the manner in which a series of static images (frames) presented at a high enough speed (frames per second) will be perceived as a continuously dynamic single image. This is how movies and videos work in presenting an apparent (but merely apparent) impression of continuity and seamless change.

If I place you in a dark room in front of a projection screen, and coordinate the projector's projection of a red dot on the screen with your cyclical brain wave patterns just right, I can either:

- not project the red dot at the precise instants your visual system is "capturing" a bite of light, and hence prevent you from perceiving the dot's presence (even if the dot is being projected for the majority of the experiment's duration); or

- project the red dot only during those brief intervals when your visual system is "capturing" the scene, and hence make you perceive the dot as a persistent presence (even if the dot is being projected for only a small fraction of the experiment's duration).

In this latter case, your neural infrastructure is simplifying an extremely fast series of flashing dots into a subjective impression of a continuously present / persistent dot.

In an analogous but higher-order fashion, your cognitive capabilities are simplifying recognized discontinuous changes within your perceived / received impressions of the environment into a continuous linear progression of changes. We treat this apparent progression as if it's a characteristic of an objective environment passively perceived, when it's actually a descriptive fiction projected onto an environment the perception of which we actively construct and construe to a large extent.

We are biased toward attributing this impression to the environment because it's an inescapable result of experience in light of how we (especially our perceptual / cognitive faculties) operate. We don't readily recognize it as a side-effect of how we operate because we are more or less blind to how we operate when immersed in operating.

Once we're biased into projecting this linear motif onto the dynamics of the perceived environment, we can turn around and treat it as the basis for a sort of virtual yardstick which can be applied to illustrate and / or measure distances among discriminable points along the progression's course. In measuring spatial distances, there's a direct mapping applied between linear spatial disjunctions and a set of marks representing units of measurement on one's ruler. Informally, these marks are sometimes called "ticks" (not to be confused with "tick marks" used to check items on a list).

In measuring ephemeral temporal distances, an analogous mapping is done with respect to units of duration. These units must be, and hence are, demarcated by a different type of "tick" - i.e., an instance of an action or event that is cyclical and repeats with a reliably uniform frequency. The audible ticks of a clock are also, and in the other sense, the ticks along the virtual yardstick we use for measuring linear "time."

Circling back to the quirks of our neural infrastructure and discontinuous "captures" translated into an impression of a continuous linear progression ... The cyclical "ticking" of a clock's physical or virtual functioning is used to measure distances / disjunctions along a progression whose very conceptualization is not commonly understood to be derived from the "ticking" of another cyclically operating mechanism - i.e., the human perceptual / cognitive apparatus. As such, the very notion of "time" is based on the nature of the observer and his / her subjective operations "inside" rather than the sort of objectively demonstrable factors pertaining to spatial phenomena "out there."

As a result, it's far more defensible to consider "time" as a conveniently simplified explanatory fiction for addressing an inescapable state of affairs associated with how we each work individually rather than a demonstrably objective characteristic of the universe we inhabit.

Anyway ... This is how I formally see it. I make no claims about the extent (if any) to which INT21 was alluding to or pointing toward this sort of interpretation of "time".
 
You can't describe something (X) as continuous (versus discontinuous) until and unless you accept the notion that X is "real" in some sense.

Your seemingly direct experience is actually indirect, being mediated by your neural equipment and how it functions.

The notion that there is a "real" linear coordinate dimension that has its own objective characteristics is, in effect, a fiction or figment of our human imaginations. It's a construct or orientation that simplifies our descriptions of and explanations for dynamic changes we perceive.

Our sensory perception and cognitive recognition of what's perceived is not, as it turns out, continuous at all. Your neural infrastructure is accepting, processing, depicting, and (for lack of a better term) "recording" your sensory experience in rapid cycles (multiple times per second). Your subjective impression (itself a product of the same set of neural infrastructure) is simplified into a sort of blurred continuity. This is analogous to the manner in which a series of static images (frames) presented at a high enough speed (frames per second) will be perceived as a continuously dynamic single image. This is how movies and videos work in presenting an apparent (but merely apparent) impression of continuity and seamless change.

If I place you in a dark room in front of a projection screen, and coordinate the projector's projection of a red dot on the screen with your cyclical brain wave patterns just right, I can either:

- not project the red dot at the precise instants your visual system is "capturing" a bite of light, and hence prevent you from perceiving the dot's presence (even if the dot is being projected for the majority of the experiment's duration); or

- project the red dot only during those brief intervals when your visual system is "capturing" the scene, and hence make you perceive the dot as a persistent presence (even if the dot is being projected for only a small fraction of the experiment's duration).

In this latter case, your neural infrastructure is simplifying an extremely fast series of flashing dots into a subjective impression of a continuously present / persistent dot.

In an analogous but higher-order fashion, your cognitive capabilities are simplifying recognized discontinuous changes within your perceived / received impressions of the environment into a continuous linear progression of changes. We treat this apparent progression as if it's a characteristic of an objective environment passively perceived, when it's actually a descriptive fiction projected onto an environment the perception of which we actively construct and construe to a large extent.

We are biased toward attributing this impression to the environment because it's an inescapable result of experience in light of how we (especially our perceptual / cognitive faculties) operate. We don't readily recognize it as a side-effect of how we operate because we are more or less blind to how we operate when immersed in operating.

Once we're biased into projecting this linear motif onto the dynamics of the perceived environment, we can turn around and treat it as the basis for a sort of virtual yardstick which can be applied to illustrate and / or measure distances among discriminable points along the progression's course. In measuring spatial distances, there's a direct mapping applied between linear spatial disjunctions and a set of marks representing units of measurement on one's ruler. Informally, these marks are sometimes called "ticks" (not to be confused with "tick marks" used to check items on a list).

In measuring ephemeral temporal distances, an analogous mapping is done with respect to units of duration. These units must be, and hence are, demarcated by a different type of "tick" - i.e., an instance of an action or event that is cyclical and repeats with a reliably uniform frequency. The audible ticks of a clock are also, and in the other sense, the ticks along the virtual yardstick we use for measuring linear "time."

Circling back to the quirks of our neural infrastructure and discontinuous "captures" translated into an impression of a continuous linear progression ... The cyclical "ticking" of a clock's physical or virtual functioning is used to measure distances / disjunctions along a progression whose very conceptualization is not commonly understood to be derived from the "ticking" of another cyclically operating mechanism - i.e., the human perceptual / cognitive apparatus. As such, the very notion of "time" is based on the nature of the observer and his / her subjective operations "inside" rather than the sort of objectively demonstrable factors pertaining to spatial phenomena "out there."

As a result, it's far more defensible to consider "time" as a conveniently simplified explanatory fiction for addressing an inescapable state of affairs associated with how we each work individually rather than a demonstrably objective characteristic of the universe we inhabit.

Anyway ... This is how I formally see it. I make no claims about the extent (if any) to which INT21 was alluding to or pointing toward this sort of interpretation of "time".

Nice explanation.

The thing about us perceiving static images as continuous brings to mind something I read in - I believe -a book (I thought it was in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sachs, but I've just had a quick skim and I can't find it), in which was described the case of a person who (for exact neurological reasons which escape me now) was unable to perceive things as moving and instead did see them as static images.
E.g. if the person was looking at traffic whilst waiting to cross a road, they wouldn't see a car moving smoothly toward them but instead would see a car far away - then a car inexplicably closer - and then closer -... you get the picture.

I remember thinking how utterly terrifying it must be to live in a world perceived that way.
 
Nice explanation. ...

The thing about us perceiving static images as continuous brings to mind something I read in - I believe -a book (I thought it was in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sachs, but I've just had a quick skim and I can't find it), in which was described the case of a person who (for exact neurological reasons which escape me now) was unable to perceive things as moving and instead did see them as static images.
E.g. if the person was looking at traffic whilst waiting to cross a road, they wouldn't see a car moving smoothly toward them but instead would see a car far away - then a car inexplicably closer - and then closer -... you get the picture. ...

There are multiple neurological conditions that can induce such effects. A total inability to perceive objects' motions except as a series of fixed images is akinetopsia. Another related condition is the appearance of residual "echo" images appearing in the wake of a moving object - i.e., the sort of "trailing" observed under the influence of LSD and other hallucinogens.

Sacks cited this sort of phenomenon in his book on migraine, as he notes in this 2004 piece in the New York Review of Books:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/01/15/in-the-river-of-consciousness/

A PDF file of the complete article can be accessed at this separate site:

http://heavysideindustries.com/wp-c...liver-Sachs-In-the-River-of-Consciousness.pdf
 
If a planck length is the smallest measureable distance, might not spacetime be made of discrete planck pixels instead a continuum?
Interesting thought. We'd only perceive it in terms of 'pixels' because that is the limit of our measurement technology.
That doesn't mean that it is actually pixellated.
 
Nice explanation.

The thing about us perceiving static images as continuous brings to mind something I read in - I believe -a book (I thought it was in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sachs, but I've just had a quick skim and I can't find it), in which was described the case of a person who (for exact neurological reasons which escape me now) was unable to perceive things as moving and instead did see them as static images.
E.g. if the person was looking at traffic whilst waiting to cross a road, they wouldn't see a car moving smoothly toward them but instead would see a car far away - then a car inexplicably closer - and then closer -... you get the picture.

I remember thinking how utterly terrifying it must be to live in a world perceived that way.

I think we all perceive an approaching car that way.

We do a series of things very quickly.

Observe the presence of the car for the first time.
Observe the car a fraction of a second later.
Calculate the speed of the car from the distance it has covered fince the first observation.
estimate the distance we need to cover to get across the road,
estimate the probability that, at our walking speed, we can get across before the car reaches our point of crossing.
We also have to make an existential assumption that the car will not accelerate and change the calculation factors.
Then we make our move.

And we do this virtually without thought.

Are we not clever ?

INT21.
 
Enolagaia,

Yes, that sort of agrees with my view on time.

One point about your 'red dot'.

If you look at a screen in a dark room with a red dot projeted on it, it will after a short while appear to move upwards and to the right.

A phenomenon we were told about in Army training.

INT21.
 
I think we all perceive an approaching car that way.

We do a series of things very quickly.

Observe the presence of the car for the first time.
Observe the car a fraction of a second later.
Calculate the speed of the car from the distance it has covered fince the first observation.
estimate the distance we need to cover to get across the road,
estimate the probability that, at our walking speed, we can get across before the car reaches our point of crossing.
We also have to make an existential assumption that the car will not accelerate and change the calculation factors.
Then we make our move.

And we do this virtually without thought.

Are we not clever ?

INT21.

Well yes, the brain is an amazing thing. But the point was that we don't see the movement as individual frames, as the person with the neurological problem does as described in the book I'd read.



If you look at a screen in a dark room with a red dot projeted on it, it will after a short while appear to move upwards and to the right.

A phenomenon we were told about in Army training..

Interesting - what causes that, then?
 
It's just the way your brain functions.

Don't know why.

From the army point of view it meant that if you took too long to pull the trigger on your rifle when sighting on a figure in the dark you would automatically move away from where the image actually was, and miss.
A quick sight and a snap shot seems to be the answer.

I would suggest that, in a way, we do see things in a series of individual frames, then process them in our brains.
We have to take in so many individual changes every moment that we can't possibly concentrate on all of them at the same time.
So we do the estimations I mentioned above.

Just my opinion.

INT21.
 
If a planck length is the smallest measureable distance, might not spacetime be made of discrete planck pixels instead a continuum?

Interesting thought. We'd only perceive it in terms of 'pixels' because that is the limit of our measurement technology.
That doesn't mean that it is actually pixellated.

I'm not confident that the planck length constraint is directly relevant to spacetime itself versus observations made with respect to spacetime.

"Spacetime" is a mathematically modeled abstraction rather than a literal description of our universe's most essential fabric.

By way of alluding to Korzybski (which I seem to be doing more lately ... ), the abstract spacetime model is the map that is not the territory (i.e., physical realization of the universe in most basic terms). The planck length constraint pertains to the territory, and my off-the-cuff initial gut impression is that it has no necessary interrelationship with the map.

On the other hand ... The planck length constraint definitely entails bounds for what observations may occur and / or how precise they can be.
 
... One point about your 'red dot'.
If you look at a screen in a dark room with a red dot projeted on it, it will after a short while appear to move upwards and to the right.
A phenomenon we were told about in Army training. ...

Yes - I'm quite familiar with that phenomenon. It's not related to what I was discussing earlier.

The eyes aren't rigidly gimbaled, so it's a challenge to keep them tightly aimed at, and focused upon, a particular spot for very long. The bottom line is that they will eventually begin to shift slightly, resulting in the perception that the fixed visual target begins to drift within the field of view.
 
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