[JP]

There is no time in the universe. Photon (and all other motions) moves in space only. With clocks we measure numerical order of motion.

You're contradicting yourself.  An order of events implies time.  We see things in a certain order because we move through time. If there was no time, all events would be simultaneous and we couldn't order them.

Time is in the mind, we experience motion in time "past-present-future" that is a mind creation.

That's a philosophical point more than a scientific one.  It also requires that time exists to be perceived.

Universe is without time as predicted by Einstein and Godel. See my post "Block Universe" in new theories.

I disagree, as do Einstein's (and presumably and Godel's equations).  Special and general relativity assume a time coordinate.  I think what Godel was getting at is that something could in some theoretical universes move through space without moving through time.  That's completely different from saying that time doesn't exist.  We are, after all, perfectly happy with moving through time without moving through space--and we don't therefore claim that space doesn't exist.

If I'm interpreting what they said wrong, please let me know.

[amrit (OP)]

JP

X4 = i x c x t (1) where t is "tick" of clock in space. Clock tick in space.
(1) is equal to d = v x t
X4 is not temporal coordinate, X4 is spatial too.
We live in a 4D space.
Time is a mind model throuht we experience motion in 4D,
see our article on FQXI
http://www.fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Block_Universe.pdf

[Farsight]

I do understand this Farsight but linearity in potential, in itself, does not preclude a negative value. You can have linearity in Potential from + to - infinity with respect to an arbtrary spacial measure (say r) and its differential with respect to r would be a constant. It is also obvious that it would be the second derivative that would result in tidal forces.

Sorry to be slow getting back to you graham. I beg to differ on the negative value. The coordinate speed of light when measured from afar reduces with gravitational potential, and there's no problem with this reducing to zero. But it just can't go negative. A negative speed has no physical reality. Any solutions based on the maths here are non-real solutions. It's like asserting the reality of a carpet measuring -4 metres x -4 metres because it has an area of 16 square metres.   

My point was simply that someone can pass through a BH event horizon and there would be no specific local measurement to mark that event providing the BH were large enough to minimise destructive tidal forces.

They can't pass through it. The coordinate speed of light when measured by you and me tends to zero at the EH. That means all motion just... stops. Do read up on that Weinberg field interpretation. Once you suss it you'll know what I mean. 

But what would be their Gravitational Potential? There is no doubt that it would continue to fall as they moved toward the BH centre. From a distant observer's perspective they would have zero GP as they reach the EH but that time dilation would infinitely delay the event.

That's just it. It never happens. Their continued fall only occurs in an abstract "never-never land" beyond the end of time.

In this sense negative GP values are "cosmically censored". From the perspective of the person crossing a BH EH, I guess it would not be the first thing on his mind. I'm never sure what he would see though there are some interesting simulations and animations on the web. Perhaps he should see the distant observer having infinite GP.

He doesn't see anything. Light has stopped. Coordinate transformations do not take adequate account of this.

Anyway, this is not so profound as I first thought and is not leading to any great insight. It does suggest that GP would depend on from whose perspective it is being measured and that the scale can slide so as to define the zero value at (say) an EH.

It's all very simple stuff. It's much more mundane than the mooted point-singularites, and there are no infinities, just a c=0 at the event horizon. 

[Farsight]

I did a bit of poking around to find out what Godel actually did, scientifically.  What Godel did, it seems, was to work out solutions to Einstein's field equations that show that an object moving normally through the universe (i.e. on time-like paths) could go back in time. Does this cause problems with physics in our universe? Almost certainly not, since Godel's universes are not our universe. It might have philosophical implications about time being a "special" dimension.

But then Godel reasoned that "if you could visit the past, time cannot have passed". He used this to show the impossibility of time travel, not the possibility. Search A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein on "time cannot have passed" and look at pages 129 and 130. What you read when you poke around is a corrupted conclusion, rather like the Schrodinger's cat example.  

At any rate, back to your post.  I disagree with the conclusions you're drawing. We certainly don't see "space and motion through it."  What we "see" (and how GR describes the universe) is paths in space-time.

We absolutely do not. We can't see a world-line, not at all. It's an abstract concept that is useful in calculations, but it isn't something you can actually observe.

What we locally define as velocity is a measurement of the slope between the space and time components of that path at any point.

The path isn't something real and observable. What's real and observable is an object moving through space. You can observe it because light moves from the object to your eye, and because signals are moving around in your brain.

Since these paths are geometrical objects...

But they're abstract geometrical objects. You can't actually see them. Nor can you point up to the night sky and say look, there's a light cone, or look, there's a reference frame. The important point to all this is to set aside the mathematical abstractions one is accustomed to working with, and look very hard at what you actually can see. Look inside a clock, and you see things moving, not time flowing. What's out there is space and motion through it. Things travel through space, they don't actually travel through time. People say things like "we travel forward in time at one second per second", but we don't travel at all. Time travel is science fiction. Ever heard of a stasis box? That's science-fiction too, but it's useful to demonstrate something: get in the box, and the "stasis field" prevents all motion, even at the atomic level. So you can't move, your heart doesn't beat, and you can't even think. When I open the box five hundred years later, to you it's like I opened the box as soon as you got in. You "travelled" to the future by not moving at all. Instead everything else did. And all that motion, be it the motion of planets or people or atoms or light, is through space.

...what you can physically measure are distances.

Yes, you can measure distances, but look at how you do it. The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a complete vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. You're using the motion of light to define your distance.

From these distances you can derive slopes. Therefore, time is a fundamental quantity (it's a measure of "distance") and speed is a derived quantity (it's a measure of slope, or a ratio of "distances.")

I'm afraid that's incorrect. You define both the second and the metre using the motion of light, and that means motion is the fundamental quantity, along with space. Time is the emergent property, not motion. 

Can you provide any scientific evidence to the contrary?

Yes, the definition of the second and the metre, along with pair production, the Shapiro delay, the GPS clock adjustment, and of course the NIST fountain clock. Geezer objects to what I said about the latter, but pair production does tell us that the electron is literally made from light, so it's reasonable to assert that the electron spin-flip hyperfine transition in a Caesium atom is some kind of electromagnetic change or rotation or translation or motion. When the motion is slower in a region of low gravitational potential, the second is bigger, and we call it gravitational time dilation. You might have some difficulty accepting this, but there's absolutely no scientific evidence for time is running slower. None whatsoever.

[Farsight]

...An order of events implies time. We see things in a certain order because we move through time. If there was no time, all events would be simultaneous and we couldn't order them.

Apologies amrit, but if I can contribute here: we see things in a certain order because motion is ordered from A to B to C, and that motion is through space. We don't "move through time", that's just a figure of speech. Those events are separated by intervening motion which in turn can be construed as other events. We call it time, and time does "exist". But not the way you think. It exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion. If you think of the kinetic theory of gases, you can see that temperature is a measure of average motion, whilst heat capacity and specific heat take in the characteristics of the subject. Time is a cumulative measure of motion, the baseline being the motion of light. The universe has been going for 13.7 billion light years. And like amrit says, clocks clock up motion. You can't open the back of a clock and see time flowing or any motion through time. Just motion, through space. 

Time is in the mind, we experience motion in time "past-present-future" that is a mind creation.

That's a philosophical point more than a scientific one. It also requires that time exists to be perceived.

It is a scientific point, JP. Show me the scientific evidence for "we move through time". When you can't, you'll understand why. I'd go so far as to say that there is no scientific point that is more important than this one.

I disagree, as do Einstein's (and presumably and Godel's equations). Special and general relativity assume a time coordinate.

There's still a time coordinate, but it's a coordinate in a derived dimension. It's derived from motion through space. It isn't something that offers freedom of motion. You can move through space by hopping a metre backwards or forwards. You can't do this with time. 

I think what Godel was getting at is that something could in some theoretical universes move through space without moving through time.  That's completely different from saying that time doesn't exist.  We are, after all, perfectly happy with moving through time without moving through space - and we don't therefore claim that space doesn't exist.

See above.

If I'm interpreting what they said wrong, please let me know.

I'm afraid you are. People take this different viewpoint to mean "time does not exist". It isn't like that. It just isn't what you think it is. 

[JP]

It is a scientific point, JP. Show me the scientific evidence for "we move through time". When you can't, you'll understand why. I'd go so far as to say that there is no scientific point that is more important than this one.

The space-time interval is:

ds²=dx²-c²dt².

If dt²>0, you've moved through time.  For light, this interval is zero, so it's required to move through time. 

If you're claiming time is a derived dimension, can you provide evidence of it?  How would one revise relativity theory to account for this fact?

[Farsight]

If you're claiming time is a derived dimension, can you provide evidence of it?

Yes. Observe a motionless object. It isn't moving. We derive the time dimension and the concept that the object is "moving through time" because everything else is moving, including light, brain signals, etc. Recognising this is seeing "what's actually there" rather than abstract things that aren't actually there. It can be difficult to do without a rigourous adherence to what can I see?, which takes considerable practice. 

How would one revise relativity theory to account for this fact?

In a rather minor ontological way that takes it back to the original. Einstein's The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity gave the equations of motion, not the equations of curved spacetime. We still employ Minkowski spacetime, but we put the emphasis on motion and recognise that worldlines are plots rather than something we can observe or that an object actually moves along. The interpretation of the mathematics changes rather than the mathematics itself. Despite the fairly minor change, this old "true-to-Einstein" interpretation isn't considered to be mainstream, and tends to be discounted on those grounds alone rather than on grounds of empirical observable scientific evidence.

[Geezer]

Yes, the definition of the second and the metre, along with pair production, the Shapiro delay, the GPS clock adjustment, and of course the NIST fountain clock. Geezer objects to what I said about the latter, but pair production does tell us that the electron is literally made from light, so it's reasonable to assert that the electron spin-flip hyperfine transition in a Caesium atom is some kind of electromagnetic change or rotation or translation or motion. When the motion is slower in a region of low gravitational potential, the second is bigger, and we call it gravitational time dilation. You might have some difficulty accepting this, but there's absolutely no scientific evidence for time is running slower. None whatsoever.

Farsight, my objections were mainly to your description of the operation of the NIST clock and I did agree with you that the fundamental action in the caesium atoms is electromagnetic. I think I also pointed out that clocks simply count events and that we can observe time dilation because of differences in the count of events.

As you point out, we measure the thing we refer to as time by using clocks to count events. We are able to observe that the effects of motion and gravity produce different event counts. Therefore, by definition, we observe relative differences in time i.e., relative fastness or slowness. (Also, please bear in mind that very many forms of matter can be used as "clocks" in one way or another.)

To support your position that there is no relative speed difference (and therefore time as we know it does not exist) I think you will have to produce an alternative definition for whatever it is you maintain is the thing we currently know as time.

If you can't provide a definition that other people can make use of to some advantage, it's likely that everyone will simply stick with the current definition of "time" because it seems to work quite well for their purposes.

[amrit (OP)]

It is a scientific point, JP. Show me the scientific evidence for "we move through time". When you can't, you'll understand why. I'd go so far as to say that there is no scientific point that is more important than this one.

The space-time interval is:

ds²=dx²-c²dt².

If dt²>0, you've moved through time.  For light, this interval is zero, so it's required to move through time. 

If you're claiming time is a derived dimension, can you provide evidence of it?  How would one revise relativity theory to account for this fact?

"cdt" is distance as "v x t" is distance. t in this formula is "tick" of clock running in space that itself is timeless

[amrit (OP)]

...An order of events implies time. We see things in a certain order because we move through time. If there was no time, all events would be simultaneous and we couldn't order them.

Apologies amrit, but if I can contribute here: we see things in a certain order because motion is ordered from A to B to C, and that motion is through space. We don't "move through time", that's just a figure of speech. Those events are separated by intervening motion which in turn can be construed as other events. We call it time, and time does "exist". But not the way you think. It exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion. If you think of the kinetic theory of gases, you can see that temperature is a measure of average motion, whilst heat capacity and specific heat take in the characteristics of the subject. Time is a cumulative measure of motion, the baseline being the motion of light. The universe has been going for 13.7 billion light years. And like amrit says, clocks clock up motion. You can't open the back of a clock and see time flowing or any motion through time. Just motion, through space. 

Time is in the mind, we experience motion in time "past-present-future" that is a mind creation.

That's a philosophical point more than a scientific one. It also requires that time exists to be perceived.

It is a scientific point, JP. Show me the scientific evidence for "we move through time". When you can't, you'll understand why. I'd go so far as to say that there is no scientific point that is more important than this one.

I disagree, as do Einstein's (and presumably and Godel's equations). Special and general relativity assume a time coordinate.

There's still a time coordinate, but it's a coordinate in a derived dimension. It's derived from motion through space. It isn't something that offers freedom of motion. You can move through space by hopping a metre backwards or forwards. You can't do this with time. 

I think what Godel was getting at is that something could in some theoretical universes move through space without moving through time.  That's completely different from saying that time doesn't exist.  We are, after all, perfectly happy with moving through time without moving through space - and we don't therefore claim that space doesn't exist.

See above.

If I'm interpreting what they said wrong, please let me know.

I'm afraid you are. People take this different viewpoint to mean "time does not exist". It isn't like that. It just isn't what you think it is. 

Farsight, time is a mind frame through which we experience motion in timeless space.

[chocochoco]

Woah. It's so interesting to me.

[amrit (OP)]

Woah. It's so interesting to me.

great, read ma full paper Block Universe
http://vixra.org/abs/1005.0098

[Farsight]

Farsight, my objections were mainly to your description of the operation of the NIST clock and I did agree with you that the fundamental action in the caesium atoms is electromagnetic. I think I also pointed out that clocks simply count events and that we can observe time dilation because of differences in the count of events.

Sounds good to me, Geezer.

As you point out, we measure the thing we refer to as time by using clocks to count events. We are able to observe that the effects of motion and gravity produce different event counts. Therefore, by definition, we observe relative differences in time i.e., relative fastness or slowness. (Also, please bear in mind that very many forms of matter can be used as "clocks" in one way or another.)

Again, sounds good.

To support your position that there is no relative speed difference (and therefore time as we know it does not exist) I think you will have to produce an alternative definition for whatever it is you maintain is the thing we currently know as time.

There must be some misunderstanding here. I've said there is a relative speed difference, challenging amrit's OP assertion. I've also said time exists like heat exists. It's just that it isn't something that really flows, and we don't really travel through it. 

If you can't provide a definition that other people can make use of to some advantage, it's likely that everyone will simply stick with the current definition of "time" because it seems to work quite well for their purposes.

This is the precis:

Time exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion. It's a cumulative measure of motion used in the relative measure of motion compared to the motion of light, and the only motion is through space. So time has no length, time doesn’t flow and we don’t travel through it.

Farsight, time is a mind frame through which we experience motion in timeless space.

I know what you mean, amrit. I use somewhat different language, but the underlying meaning is the same - what we actually observe is space and motion through it. And yet it is so very difficult to get people to let go of the idea that time flows and we travel through it, despite the total lack of scientific evidence to support such concepts.

[PhysBang]

In a rather minor ontological way that takes it back to the original. Einstein's The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity gave the equations of motion, not the equations of curved spacetime.

Could you please give an example of this? Can you at least give an example of Einstein giving equations of motion without a time coordinate?

Well, OK , I know that it is impossible to give an example of these because your claims are simply not true. Special and General Relativity are both fundamentally about how we can set up our coordinates however we want, up to certain limits, but they always include spacial coordinates and a time coordinate.

[Farsight]

In a rather minor ontological way that takes it back to the original. Einstein's The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity gave the equations of motion, not the equations of curved spacetime.

Could you please give an example of this? Can you at least give an example of Einstein giving equations of motion without a time coordinate?

No. The time coordinate remains. All that changes is the underlying meaning of what it represents.

Well, OK , I know that it is impossible to give an example of these because your claims are simply not true...

They are true. What isn't true is that time flows or that we travel through it. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever for time flowing or for time travel. These things are science fiction, not science.     

Special and General Relativity are both fundamentally about how we can set up our coordinates however we want, up to certain limits, but they always include spatial coordinates and a time coordinate.

And that time coordinate designates a "position" in a "dimension" that is merely a measure of cumulative spatial motion calibrated against the motion of light. This position is not a real position, and the time dimension isn't a dimension like the dimensions of space. It offers no freedom of motion. There is no motion through it, and no flow, and no travel. Now go and read Time Explained and understand it. It's very simple. All you have to do is look at the observational evidence that's there in front of you, and admit to yourself that a clock does what you can see it doing. A clock "clocks up" motion, not time. 

Sorry amrit, I didn't mean to hijack your thread. I'll take a back seat. 

[amrit (OP)]

"Time exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion"...............Farsight tell me how time is property of motion, explain in deatails.

[Farsight]

TIME EXPLAINED

Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is so very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You form a mental map of the world using your senses and your brain. You use this mental map to think, and you are so immersed in it that you can’t see things the way they really are. You are locked into an irrational conviction that clocks run, that days pass, that time flows, and that a journey takes a length of time. It takes steely logic to break out of this conditioning. First of all we need to look at your senses and the things you experience. Let’s start with sight. Look at the picture below:
 


Now, squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not you answer back. We could do this all day, but they really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. Just look at the screen from a narrow angle to break the illusion. See  http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html for more details. Check it out for yourself. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, then you realise that A and B really are the same colour.

What this tells you is that colour is subjective. It isn’t a real property of things in the world. It’s perception, a "quale", and it’s in your head. A photon doesn’t actually have a colour. It has a wavelength, an oscillation, a frequency. What’s it’s got is a motion.

Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.



Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. This pressure of air or water is not some property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us that pressure is derived from motion.

You can also feel kinetic energy. If a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s impacted your chest you would feel it for sure. But apologies, my mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's you. So where's the kinetic energy now? Can you feel it coursing through your veins? No. Because what’s really there is mass, and relative motion.

You can also feel heat. Touch that stove and you feel that heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion.



Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.

The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But it probably never occurred to you because you’re accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how you experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, ontological things that are there.

And nowhere is this more so than with time.

So, what is time? Let’s start by looking up the definition of a second:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom...

So, a second is nine billion periods of radiation. But what is a period? We know that radiation is electromagnetic in nature, the thing we commonly call light. We also know that light has a frequency. So let’s look at frequency:

Frequency = 1 / T and Frequency = v / λ

This says frequency is the reciprocal of the period T, and is also velocity v divided by wavelength λ . Combining the two, we can say T = λ / v, which means a period T is a wavelength λ divided by a velocity v. To try to find out more, we can drill down into wavelength and velocity. We know that a wavelength is a distance, a thing like a metre:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second...

And we know already that a velocity is a distance divided by a time. So if a period is a wavelength divided by a velocity, that means a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. So let’s do some simple mathematics. Let’s work it through. We can combine T = λ / v and v = λ / t and write it down as:

T = λ / ( λ / t)

Then we can cancel out the λs to get:

T = 1/(1/t)

Then we cancel the double reciprocal to leave:

T = t

The answer we get is T = t. A period of time is a period of time. This mathematical definition of time is circular. The mathematics tells us nothing about its base terms. So what is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it?

Let’s look at frequency some more. What’s the definition in English?

Frequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit of time.

Our unit of time is the second. Frequency is the number of events per second. A second is nine billion periods of electromagnetic radiation. A period of radiation is an electromagnetic event, caused by an electromagnetic event happening inside an atom. For an event to happen, something has to move. Some component of the caesium atom has to travel some distance. A hyperfine transition is to do with magnetic dipole movement, a flip-flop interaction between the nucleus and an electron. It’s magnetic, so it’s electromagnetic in nature. Like the electron is electromagnetic in nature. Like the photon is electromagnetic in nature. So in some simple respect, we can consider some vital component of the atom to be electromagnetic just like light.
 


The answer comes with a rush. It’s a form of light moving inside the atom, and it causes more light, radiation with a frequency, waves with peaks, We sit there counting them as they go by, and when we get to nine billion, we say its a second. Then we use this second to measure the speed of light. We measure the speed of light in terms of the speed of light. In caesium atoms, in hydrogen atoms, in our own atoms, in the atoms of everything. No wonder it never changes.

And so the penny drops: the interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. But you need events, not frozen timeless intervals to mark out the time. The events aren’t in the time, the time is in the events. Because time is merely the measure of events, of change, measured against some other change. And for things to change, there has to be motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time.

You don’t need regular atomic motion to mark out time. Any regular motion will do. Yes, we counted nine billion oscillations and called it second. One, two, three… nine billion. But you don’t have to count microwave wavepeaks emitted by a caesium atom. You could count beans in a bucket. Ping, ping, ping, chuck them in, regular as clockwork.



You’re sitting there counting beans into the bucket, ping, ping, ping, regular as clockwork. Now, what is the direction of time? The only direction that is actually there, is the direction of the beans you’re throwing, and that direction is the direction of motion through space. A fuller bucket is not the direction of time. More beans is not the direction of time. The direction of time is the direction of your counting, and I could have asked you to count the beans out of the bucket. There is no real direction. It’s as imaginary as the direction you take when you count along the set of integers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 →

It’s imaginary, so you cannot actually point in this direction. Nor can an arrow. There is no Arrow of Beans, so there is no Arrow of Time. And since there’s no direction, there’s no direction you can possibly travel in. And since you can’t travel, you can’t travel a length, and a length can’t pass you by. It’s all abstraction, a false concept rooted in the language we use to think. Yet we never ever think about what the words actually mean. Instead we say the clock is running slow as if a clock is an athlete. We say the day went quickly but it didn’t go anywhere. We say years pass, but they don’t go by like buses.



The only directions that are there, are the directions of the spatial motions that make the events that we use to measure the intervals between the other events. What’s there is the motion of light, the motion of atoms, and the motion of clocks, buses, and rivers. What’s there is the motion of the earth, and the sun, moon, and stars. And these motions are being counted, incremented, added up. We count regular atomic motion to use as a ratio against some other motion, be it of light, clocks, or buses. All of these things have motion, both internal motion and travelling motion. And all those motions are real, with real directions in space. But the time direction isn't real. It's as imaginary as a trip to nine billion.

That's why the past is only in your head, in your memory, in your records. It isn’t a place you can travel to. It’s just the places where things were. All those places that are still here in the universe. And while the past is the sum of all nows, now lasts for no time at all. Because there’s no time like the present, and time needs events, and when you take away the events, you take away the time. A second isn’t some slice of spacetime. It’s just nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. Accelerate to half the speed of light and a second is still nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. But there's only half the local motion there used to be, because the other half is already doing the travelling motion through space. That’s why time dilates.

It’s easy to understand time dilation. Imagine yourself as a metronome. Each tick is a thought in your head, a beat in your heart, a second of your time. If you’re motionless with respect to me I see you ticking like this: |||. If you flash by in a spaceship, I see you ticking like this: /\/\/\. If you could reach c and we know you can’t, you wouldn’t tick at all. Your time would flatline like this ______ because any transverse motion would cause c to be exceeded. You wouldn’t tick for me, you wouldn’t tick for you, and you wouldn’t tick for anybody else in the universe.

That’s the thing we’re interested in. The universe. That’s the thing that’s out there, the thing we’re a part of, the thing we’re trying to understand. It’s full of motion, and this is what it’s like:



What can you see? What can you measure? You can measure the height. You can measure the width. And if it wasn't just a picture you could measure the depth. That's three Dimensions, with a capital D because we have freedom of movement in those dimensions. What else can you see? What else can you measure? You might imagine a fourth dimension, a time dimension. But the picture comes from the wikipedia temperature page. It’s a gif, a moving image, and in that image, those red and blue dots are moving. The thing you can measure is temperature.

Temperature is an aspect of heat, an emergent property, a derived effect of atomic and molecular motion. When you measure the temperature, you are measuring an aggregate motion. If you were one of those dots, you would not talk of climbing to a “higher temperature”. There is no real height. You can’t literally climb to a higher temperature. Hence we don’t call temperature a dimension. But people did. Temperature used to be called a dimension, but the word has gradually changed from its original meaning of “measure”, and is now assumed to be something that offers a degree of freedom, something you can move through.

We are immersed in time like the dots are immersed in temperature. It’s a different measure, but just as we cannot travel in temperature because there is no real height, we cannot travel in time because there is no real length. Because time is a dimension with a small d. There is no degree of freedom. I can hop backwards a metre but not backwards a second. Because time is a measure of change rather than a measure of place, and it has no absolute units, because you can only measure one change of place against another. It’s a relative measure of motion. The units are relative, and that’s what Special Relativity was telling us all along.

Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your relative velocity and space appears to contract while time dilates by a factor of √(1-v²/c²). If you travel at .99c, space appears to contract to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The star didn’t become a disc because you flashed by. The space in the universe didn’t really contract because you travelled through it. But your time did.



Einstein didn’t quite understand the full meaning of relativity until later in life. He started off by saying there is no absolute time, using a postulate that says the the speed of light is always measured to be the same. But when he did general relativity, he said the speed of light varies with position. It it wasn’t until he was with Godel in Princeton that he really got it:
 
"It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away... (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time)".



And what he got was this: time exists like heat exists. It’s real because it does things to us. But just like heat it’s an emergent property, a derived effect of motion. It means time is not fundamental. It isn’t a dimension like the dimensions of space. We don’t see four dimensions. We see space and motion through it. The thing called c is a conversion factor, between the measure of distance and the measure we call time, and both are derived from the motion of light. It’s the motion that’s king, the universe is not a block universe, it is a world in motion. The worldlines are only in mathematical space, and in your head. There’s no place that’s the future, and no place that’s the past. There’s only this place, and the time is always now. We don’t travel in time at one second per second. We don't travel in time at all. To travel backwards in time we'd need to unevent events, we’d need negative motion. But motion is motion whichever way it goes. You can’t have negative motion, just as you can’t have negative distance. Just as you can’t have negative carpets. So you can’t travel in time. There are no time travel paradoxes, because there is no time travel, and there is no time travel because time is just a relative measure of motion. And motion is travel. You can’t travel through travel.

So those celebrity physicists who talk earnestly of time machines are wrong. Dead wrong. Not even wrong. And all those folk who puzzle about the beginning of time are chasing the wrong horse. There never was any beginning of time. Time didn’t start thirteen point seven billion years ago. Because time didn’t start in the first place. It was motion that started in the first place. It was a place, not a time. And it’s this place, the place we call the universe, marked out by every light path you can track through timeless space. That’s how far we’ve come. A long long way, in no time at all

[amrit (OP)]

Amrit, (to quote from Monty Python) this is contradiction, not argument.

"Space is timeless" is meaningless unless you explain your definitions
"'Velocity' of clocks" is also not what you mean (I think).
It has everything to do with the observer and the different gravitational potential. If you were to do the maths rigorously you would find the "spacetime interval" will be the same to all observers.
The rules of the universe are what they are and not what you choose them to be, so by all means do your experiment, but you seem to have presupposed the result. But if it turned out you were right you will surprise a lot of people :-)

space is timeless means that time is not part of the space, physical time is "tick" of clocks

[amrit (OP)]

TIME EXPLAINED

Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is so very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You form a mental map of the world using your senses and your brain. You use this mental map to think, and you are so immersed in it that you can’t see things the way they really are. You are locked into an irrational conviction that clocks run, that days pass, that time flows, and that a journey takes a length of time. It takes steely logic to break out of this conditioning. First of all we need to look at your senses and the things you experience. Let’s start with sight. Look at the picture below:
 


Now, squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not you answer back. We could do this all day, but they really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. Just look at the screen from a narrow angle to break the illusion. See  http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html for more details. Check it out for yourself. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, then you realise that A and B really are the same colour.

What this tells you is that colour is subjective. It isn’t a real property of things in the world. It’s perception, a "quale", and it’s in your head. A photon doesn’t actually have a colour. It has a wavelength, an oscillation, a frequency. What’s it’s got is a motion.

Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.



Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. This pressure of air or water is not some property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us that pressure is derived from motion.

You can also feel kinetic energy. If a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s impacted your chest you would feel it for sure. But apologies, my mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's you. So where's the kinetic energy now? Can you feel it coursing through your veins? No. Because what’s really there is mass, and relative motion.

You can also feel heat. Touch that stove and you feel that heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion.



Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.

The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But it probably never occurred to you because you’re accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how you experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, ontological things that are there.

And nowhere is this more so than with time.

So, what is time? Let’s start by looking up the definition of a second:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom...

So, a second is nine billion periods of radiation. But what is a period? We know that radiation is electromagnetic in nature, the thing we commonly call light. We also know that light has a frequency. So let’s look at frequency:

Frequency = 1 / T and Frequency = v / λ

This says frequency is the reciprocal of the period T, and is also velocity v divided by wavelength λ . Combining the two, we can say T = λ / v, which means a period T is a wavelength λ divided by a velocity v. To try to find out more, we can drill down into wavelength and velocity. We know that a wavelength is a distance, a thing like a metre:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second...

And we know already that a velocity is a distance divided by a time. So if a period is a wavelength divided by a velocity, that means a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. So let’s do some simple mathematics. Let’s work it through. We can combine T = λ / v and v = λ / t and write it down as:

T = λ / ( λ / t)

Then we can cancel out the λs to get:

T = 1/(1/t)

Then we cancel the double reciprocal to leave:

T = t

The answer we get is T = t. A period of time is a period of time. This mathematical definition of time is circular. The mathematics tells us nothing about its base terms. So what is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it?

Let’s look at frequency some more. What’s the definition in English?

Frequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit of time.

Our unit of time is the second. Frequency is the number of events per second. A second is nine billion periods of electromagnetic radiation. A period of radiation is an electromagnetic event, caused by an electromagnetic event happening inside an atom. For an event to happen, something has to move. Some component of the caesium atom has to travel some distance. A hyperfine transition is to do with magnetic dipole movement, a flip-flop interaction between the nucleus and an electron. It’s magnetic, so it’s electromagnetic in nature. Like the electron is electromagnetic in nature. Like the photon is electromagnetic in nature. So in some simple respect, we can consider some vital component of the atom to be electromagnetic just like light.
 


The answer comes with a rush. It’s a form of light moving inside the atom, and it causes more light, radiation with a frequency, waves with peaks, We sit there counting them as they go by, and when we get to nine billion, we say its a second. Then we use this second to measure the speed of light. We measure the speed of light in terms of the speed of light. In caesium atoms, in hydrogen atoms, in our own atoms, in the atoms of everything. No wonder it never changes.

And so the penny drops: the interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. But you need events, not frozen timeless intervals to mark out the time. The events aren’t in the time, the time is in the events. Because time is merely the measure of events, of change, measured against some other change. And for things to change, there has to be motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time.

You don’t need regular atomic motion to mark out time. Any regular motion will do. Yes, we counted nine billion oscillations and called it second. One, two, three… nine billion. But you don’t have to count microwave wavepeaks emitted by a caesium atom. You could count beans in a bucket. Ping, ping, ping, chuck them in, regular as clockwork.



You’re sitting there counting beans into the bucket, ping, ping, ping, regular as clockwork. Now, what is the direction of time? The only direction that is actually there, is the direction of the beans you’re throwing, and that direction is the direction of motion through space. A fuller bucket is not the direction of time. More beans is not the direction of time. The direction of time is the direction of your counting, and I could have asked you to count the beans out of the bucket. There is no real direction. It’s as imaginary as the direction you take when you count along the set of integers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 →

It’s imaginary, so you cannot actually point in this direction. Nor can an arrow. There is no Arrow of Beans, so there is no Arrow of Time. And since there’s no direction, there’s no direction you can possibly travel in. And since you can’t travel, you can’t travel a length, and a length can’t pass you by. It’s all abstraction, a false concept rooted in the language we use to think. Yet we never ever think about what the words actually mean. Instead we say the clock is running slow as if a clock is an athlete. We say the day went quickly but it didn’t go anywhere. We say years pass, but they don’t go by like buses.



The only directions that are there, are the directions of the spatial motions that make the events that we use to measure the intervals between the other events. What’s there is the motion of light, the motion of atoms, and the motion of clocks, buses, and rivers. What’s there is the motion of the earth, and the sun, moon, and stars. And these motions are being counted, incremented, added up. We count regular atomic motion to use as a ratio against some other motion, be it of light, clocks, or buses. All of these things have motion, both internal motion and travelling motion. And all those motions are real, with real directions in space. But the time direction isn't real. It's as imaginary as a trip to nine billion.

That's why the past is only in your head, in your memory, in your records. It isn’t a place you can travel to. It’s just the places where things were. All those places that are still here in the universe. And while the past is the sum of all nows, now lasts for no time at all. Because there’s no time like the present, and time needs events, and when you take away the events, you take away the time. A second isn’t some slice of spacetime. It’s just nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. Accelerate to half the speed of light and a second is still nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. But there's only half the local motion there used to be, because the other half is already doing the travelling motion through space. That’s why time dilates.

It’s easy to understand time dilation. Imagine yourself as a metronome. Each tick is a thought in your head, a beat in your heart, a second of your time. If you’re motionless with respect to me I see you ticking like this: |||. If you flash by in a spaceship, I see you ticking like this: /\/\/\. If you could reach c and we know you can’t, you wouldn’t tick at all. Your time would flatline like this ______ because any transverse motion would cause c to be exceeded. You wouldn’t tick for me, you wouldn’t tick for you, and you wouldn’t tick for anybody else in the universe.

That’s the thing we’re interested in. The universe. That’s the thing that’s out there, the thing we’re a part of, the thing we’re trying to understand. It’s full of motion, and this is what it’s like:



What can you see? What can you measure? You can measure the height. You can measure the width. And if it wasn't just a picture you could measure the depth. That's three Dimensions, with a capital D because we have freedom of movement in those dimensions. What else can you see? What else can you measure? You might imagine a fourth dimension, a time dimension. But the picture comes from the wikipedia temperature page. It’s a gif, a moving image, and in that image, those red and blue dots are moving. The thing you can measure is temperature.

Temperature is an aspect of heat, an emergent property, a derived effect of atomic and molecular motion. When you measure the temperature, you are measuring an aggregate motion. If you were one of those dots, you would not talk of climbing to a “higher temperature”. There is no real height. You can’t literally climb to a higher temperature. Hence we don’t call temperature a dimension. But people did. Temperature used to be called a dimension, but the word has gradually changed from its original meaning of “measure”, and is now assumed to be something that offers a degree of freedom, something you can move through.

We are immersed in time like the dots are immersed in temperature. It’s a different measure, but just as we cannot travel in temperature because there is no real height, we cannot travel in time because there is no real length. Because time is a dimension with a small d. There is no degree of freedom. I can hop backwards a metre but not backwards a second. Because time is a measure of change rather than a measure of place, and it has no absolute units, because you can only measure one change of place against another. It’s a relative measure of motion. The units are relative, and that’s what Special Relativity was telling us all along.

Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your relative velocity and space appears to contract while time dilates by a factor of √(1-v²/c²). If you travel at .99c, space appears to contract to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The star didn’t become a disc because you flashed by. The space in the universe didn’t really contract because you travelled through it. But your time did.



Einstein didn’t quite understand the full meaning of relativity until later in life. He started off by saying there is no absolute time, using a postulate that says the the speed of light is always measured to be the same. But when he did general relativity, he said the speed of light varies with position. It it wasn’t until he was with Godel in Princeton that he really got it:
 
"It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away... (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time)".



And what he got was this: time exists like heat exists. It’s real because it does things to us. But just like heat it’s an emergent property, a derived effect of motion. It means time is not fundamental. It isn’t a dimension like the dimensions of space. We don’t see four dimensions. We see space and motion through it. The thing called c is a conversion factor, between the measure of distance and the measure we call time, and both are derived from the motion of light. It’s the motion that’s king, the universe is not a block universe, it is a world in motion. The worldlines are only in mathematical space, and in your head. There’s no place that’s the future, and no place that’s the past. There’s only this place, and the time is always now. We don’t travel in time at one second per second. We don't travel in time at all. To travel backwards in time we'd need to unevent events, we’d need negative motion. But motion is motion whichever way it goes. You can’t have negative motion, just as you can’t have negative distance. Just as you can’t have negative carpets. So you can’t travel in time. There are no time travel paradoxes, because there is no time travel, and there is no time travel because time is just a relative measure of motion. And motion is travel. You can’t travel through travel.

So those celebrity physicists who talk earnestly of time machines are wrong. Dead wrong. Not even wrong. And all those folk who puzzle about the beginning of time are chasing the wrong horse. There never was any beginning of time. Time didn’t start thirteen point seven billion years ago. Because time didn’t start in the first place. It was motion that started in the first place. It was a place, not a time. And it’s this place, the place we call the universe, marked out by every light path you can track through timeless space. That’s how far we’ve come. A long long way, in no time at all

Farsight "Time exist as heat exists" is a pure illusion of your mind. You take a hot stone in cold room. Stone will "coll" down. Not in time, in space only. And numerical order of stone colling down you measure with clocks: t0, t1, t2, t3.....tn. Lets say tn is 2500 second. in 2500 second stone has same temperature as room. Clock tick in space only, stone get coll in space only. yours amrit

[amrit (OP)]

in proper english:
Farsight "Time exists as heat exists" is a pure illusion of your mind. You take a hot stone in cold room. Stone will "cool" down. Not in time, in space only. And numerical order of stone cooling down you measure with clocks: t0, t1, t2, t3.....tn. Lets say tn is 2500 second. in 2500 second stone has same temperature as room. Clock tick in space only, stone get cool in space only. yours amrit