[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Does time jump from tiny discrete moments to moments, or does it flow like a river, or is it just a "Now"?

Alan

[guest39538]

Is time discrete or does it flow like a river or is it just a "Now" moments?

Alan

Well just now....hang on let me start again,  well just now.....hang on let me start over, well just now has gone by already.

The speed of now becoming the past is the fastest process that exists. It is instantaneous,

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Is time discrete or does it flow like a river or is it just a "Now" moments?

Alan

Well just now....hang on let me start again,  well just now.....hang on let me start over, well just now has gone by already.

The speed of now becoming the past is the fastest process that exists. It is instantaneous,

I get your point, as far as a moment in time is concerned, is that there is no such a thing, because just when you think the moment has arrived,   it is already in the past?

[guest39538]

I get your point, as far as a moment in time is concerned, is that there is no such a thing, because just when you think the moment has arrived,   it is already in the past?

Exactly Alan, any measurement after 0 is instantaneous history, but I will be banned soon and nobody listens or discusses anyway.

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

I get your point, as far as a moment in time is concerned, is that there is no such a thing, because just when you think the moment has arrived,   it is already in the past?

Exactly Alan, any measurement after 0 is instantaneous history, but I will be banned soon and nobody listens or discusses anyway.

Why should you be banned you seem to be a nice person?

[guest39538]

Why should you be banned you seem to be a nice person?

I am a nice person , but this is not really the section to discuss this sorry.


Science fail to answer me and do not like blunt opinions in my blunt opinion.


The problem with the future is that we can see it if we look ahead of our planetary orbital path, the other problem is that if we look behind us and changed our velocity we would still be looking into our future path.  I see my future path, I will make the prediction of a ban, maybe I am pushing for a ban because I think people fail to discuss on here.

[Colin2B]

Alan
No one disagrees with the idea that all time before the current moment is history and all after is future.
However you will notice he says:

Exactly Alan, any measurement after 0 is instantaneous history, but I will be banned soon and nobody listens or discusses anyway.

I think he means 'measurement before ..", but he insists on calling the present 0 and concocting theories of time always being 0. This is what we refuse to repeatedly discuss.
If someone asks me the time I do not answer 0.
If I start a journey at an arbitrary 0, I do not claim to arrive at 0 and have taken 0 time.
The box has done this in other threads which is why they are moved.


Edit: I think for some odd reason he would like to be banned. Others have been for similar behaviour.

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Alan
No one disagrees with the idea that all time before the current moment is history and all after is future.
However you will notice he says:

Exactly Alan, any measurement after 0 is instantaneous history, but I will be banned soon and nobody listens or discusses anyway.

I think he means 'measurement before ..", but he insists on calling the present 0 and concocting theories of time always being 0. This is what we refuse to repeatedly discuss.
If someone asks me the time I do not answer 0.
If I start a journey at an arbitrary 0, I do not claim to arrive at 0 and have taken 0 time.
The box has done this in other threads which is why they are moved.


Edit: I think for some odd reason he would like to be banned. Others have been for similar behaviour.

I like calling the present 'Now" the Past the "Past" and the future the "Future" I agree giving the presence a null denotation of 0 or zero makes no sense!

[guest39538]

Alan
No one disagrees with the idea that all time before the current moment is history and all after is future.

How can all after time be future if all time before the ''now'' is history?

Contradictory Colin.

All after what Colin?

[guest39538]

I like calling the presence 'Now" the Past the "Past" and the future the "Future" I agree giving the presence a null denotation of 0 or zero makes no sense!

''Now'' always starts at zero , any start point starts at 0 , the big bang started at 0, it makes no sense because you have not discussed it.

There is many people who say time does not exist or is an illusion, this includes some scientists and not just me.


I gave proof and ''they'' ignored it, please try to measure time, any increment of measurement no matter how small is a length of history because it is greater than 0.

Time is a length of recording that expands at an instantaneous rate, 0 is a mark that moves forward writing a past , ahead of zero is more zeros, the future is not written. 


''they'' do not  understand.

[Colin2B]

How can all after time be future if all time before the ''now'' is history

That's not what I said, don't misquote

[jeffreyH]

I like calling the presence 'Now" the Past the "Past" and the future the "Future" I agree giving the presence a null denotation of 0 or zero makes no sense!

''Now'' always starts at zero , any start point starts at 0 , the big bang started at 0, it makes no sense because you have not discussed it.

There is many people who say time does not exist or is an illusion, this includes some scientists and not just me.


I gave proof and ''they'' ignored it, please try to measure time, any increment of measurement no matter how small is a length of history because it is greater than 0.

Time is a length of recording that expands at an instantaneous rate, 0 is a mark that moves forward writing a past , ahead of zero is more zeros, the future is not written. 


''they'' do not  understand.

Well I do understand. Although you are very bad at getting your point across. Now is an infinitesimally small increment that may as well be an amount of time equal to zero. Therefore any measurement of time that is made is always  of a history rather than a present. However you have neglected to consider the Planck scale. A minimum of 1 Planck time would be a better choice than zero. It can be considered to be quite similar to the infinitesimally small time increment you are considering. I would not welcome a ban from the forum since then you are giving up on the possibility of improving your method of expressing your ideas to others and gaining the benefit of the wisdom of some very knowlegeable individuals.

[guest39538]

Well I do understand. Although you are very bad at getting your point across. Now is an infinitesimally small increment that may as well be an amount of time equal to zero. Therefore any measurement of time that is made is always  of a history rather than a present. However you have neglected to consider the Planck scale. A minimum of 1 Planck time would be a better choice than zero. It can be considered to be quite similar to the infinitesimally small time increment you are considering. I would not welcome a ban from the forum since then you are giving up on the possibility of improving your method of expressing your ideas to others and gaining the benefit of the wisdom of some very knowlegeable individuals.

Thank you for understanding Jeff. I have considered any scale and physically I can't measure past 0 without  it being instant history, 

i.e take a sharp pencil and place its tip onto a sheet of paper, (making a point), try to extend this  point without it being instant history. It is impossible, and I do not really agree with impossible, but this is really impossible.

Time as we know it  in my opinion is like frames per second and light being space-time and the relationship we know that allows time to exist in any sense.

I consider the future is blank space and the past is information filled blank space, but the now is 0 and always moves forward like a ''tip'' of time filling in the space behind it.

being the past

being the future


now=0


Imagine watching a space movie, in this movie is a rocket travelling towards the sun, half hour into the journey we pause the movie, we know the past information of the movie and what has happened as the rocket travelled through blank space left behind the rocket, however the blank space we observe in  front of the rocket in the paused frame, we do not know what is going to happen in that space, this is a bit like a planet in orbit, something could get in the way and time would certainly stop for us in this scenario.

[Colin2B]

... I do understand. Although you are very bad at getting your point across.

I agree. In fact we all understand the idea of current moment, but it is the insistence on that moment being reset to 0 continuously and the confusion over time measurement.
For example, we can go on a car journey, but we do not every inch reset the trip meter to 0 and say "we are here now, it is 0, all distance is behind us, the distance ahead is 0 because we haven't been there yet".
The only benefit of that would be in a taxi and I can't see the cabbie agreeing to it.
My point is that we can measure elapsed time between events and that is very useful to us and an easy concept to understand. So I can agree in 6hrs to meet someone somewhere.

I would not welcome a ban from the forum since then you are giving up on the possibility of improving your method of expressing your ideas to others and gaining the benefit of the wisdom of some very knowlegeable individuals.

I wouldn't welcome a ban either as I agree others do learn. Even the posts on Gravity is air pressure can be educational. However, at a certain point it can block other discussion or fall over into a new theory and at that point we move the thread.
At the moment this one is still relevant unless Alan thinks his question has been hijacked.

[evan_au]

Is time discrete or does it flow like a river, or is it just a "Now" ?

This is not a new question.

The Greek Philosopher Zeno (around 450BC) posed a few paradoxes to those who thought time flowed continuously (like a river), and those who thought time proceeded like a series of "instants", with nothing in-between. He tried to show that both ideas were wrong, because they made motion impossible.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

you have neglected to consider the Planck scale.

If time proceeds in very small increments (the units of Plank time are around 5x10^-44 seconds), then from the viewpoint of any measurements we can make, time is effectively continuous.

One of the shortest time intervals ever measured is the lifetime of the Top Quark, which is estimated at 0.4 yoctoseconds, or 0.4x10^-24 seconds. This is a long way short of the Plank interval for time (by 20 orders of magnitude).

See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-fastest-event/

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Is time discrete or does it flow like a river, or is it just a "Now" ?

This is not a new question.

The Greek Philosopher Zeno (around 450BC) posed a few paradoxes to those who thought time flowed continuously (like a river), and those who thought time proceeded like a series of "instants", with nothing in-between. He tried to show that both ideas were wrong, because they made motion impossible.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

you have neglected to consider the Planck scale.

If time proceeds in very small increments (the units of Plank time are around 5x10^-44 seconds), then from the viewpoint of any measurements we can make, time is effectively continuous.

One of the shortest time intervals ever measured is the lifetime of the Top Quark, which is estimated at 0.4 yoctoseconds, or 0.4x10^-24 seconds. This is a long way short of the Plank interval for time (by 20 orders of magnitude).

See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-fastest-event/

Zeno's Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles was finally solved after the introduction of the concept of zero into western mathematics. Limits decreed that an infinitely dividable space could be traveled in a finite time.

[jeffreyH]

Is time discrete or does it flow like a river, or is it just a "Now" ?

This is not a new question.

The Greek Philosopher Zeno (around 450BC) posed a few paradoxes to those who thought time flowed continuously (like a river), and those who thought time proceeded like a series of "instants", with nothing in-between. He tried to show that both ideas were wrong, because they made motion impossible.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

you have neglected to consider the Planck scale.

If time proceeds in very small increments (the units of Plank time are around 5x10^-44 seconds), then from the viewpoint of any measurements we can make, time is effectively continuous.

One of the shortest time intervals ever measured is the lifetime of the Top Quark, which is estimated at 0.4 yoctoseconds, or 0.4x10^-24 seconds. This is a long way short of the Plank interval for time (by 20 orders of magnitude).

See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-fastest-event/

As Colin said you may not have made your post if Thebox had not made his. Your posts always enlighten me on aspects of physics I had not considered.

Thebox please take note of what is being asked of you.

[Ahalim Hamada]

the whole concept is confusing cause as another person in the forum said when u think of a present a moment its already passed and you cant realise you did something in the present because that perception will always be in the past.
so it is not like a river because if you touched water you cant touch it twice but you can see the water you touched moving foward but with time it should be moving backwards cause it is now the past

[IAMREALITY]

There is many people who say time does not exist or is an illusion, this includes some scientists and not just me.

There is [sic] many people who say that global warming does not exist or is an illusion; this includes some scientists as well....

...but they're all friggin wrong.

[IAMREALITY]

I'm not sure it's any of those things necessarily.  Time is not anything independent.  It is woven with space into spacetime correct?  So to me it's like a fabric inherent within and around everything, much like a field, and that the 'passing' of time is merely how particles, waves, and everything that's not a field interacts with spacetime.  I don't believe there's a past of anything, in any sort of physical or recordable sense (recordable isn't a word?  Friggin really??  but anyway...).  Meaning I don't believe for a second that time travel into the past is possible, for there is no record of anything to go back to.  The historical record is always something we will see in the now.  We see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago because light was generated by it and interacted with spacetime which makes it speed outward in all directions at 186,282 miles a second, and it continues to interact with that fabric across a great distance of what would be 13 billion light years, until it finally reaches our eyes in the now.  So in a sense, everything is in the now.  And I don't believe in the future being anything accessible either.  If standing at the edge of a black hole and returning home, one of the most common examples of time travel, you would be merely interacting with spacetime and having all of your particles processes slowed relative to what those on earth would be doing.  But it all still happened in the now.

So not sure if I'm explaining correctly, but I don't necessarily regard it as a flow, or as something that has recorded anything, or that is accessible instantaneously for some future state, nor something happening in frames, but rather simply an interaction, much like other interactions with any other fields.  But it's an interaction that we know little about obviously, and is as wondrous as so many other universal processes that we are only in the infant stages of understanding.