Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 64 (9164 total)
4 online now:
Newest Member: ChatGPT
Post Volume: Total: 916,902 Year: 4,159/9,624 Month: 1,030/974 Week: 357/286 Day: 0/13 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Is time merely a concept?
sinequanon
Member (Idle past 2893 days)
Posts: 331
Joined: 12-17-2007


Message 48 of 55 (441716)
12-18-2007 3:32 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Salamander
11-07-2007 4:54 PM


Salamander writes:
Is time an actual entity or just a concept?
I see time as the sensation of articulating events.
But, if we had perfect and boundless comprehension, there would be no need for articulation and all events would appear to us to have uniform and ultimate immediacy. Time would not feature.
We all use time to measure how long things take to move, but is there more to it than that? I thought quite a bit about this a few years ago when I was thinking over Zeno's dichotomy paradox. He states that we can never fully reach any point because to get to the point, we must first go half way to it, but before that, half way to the half way point, ad infinitum. Seeing as how we do reach points all the time (ie, I never have any problem getting to work), it seems there is no real paradox here, yet the reasoning is sound.
This is more of a poor mind experiment than a paradox. A continuum of points on the real number line is a mathematical concept used only as an approximation to reality.
Clearly the mathematical algorithm would never end if each step took a fixed amount of time. However, the variation of time taken for each step could only be extrapolated so far before theory departs from reality. Familiar notions and behavours do not scale indefinitely. Questions will arise of what a physical point is and what constitutes "reaching" it in practice. In reality we detect "significant" interaction, not mathematical coincidence. There would also be the problem of the limiting mechanics of frequency and wavelength.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Salamander, posted 11-07-2007 4:54 PM Salamander has not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024