February 26, 2006
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As you can see most people view the passage of time as a series of instants, the physicists view it as a smooth continuium. But are they correct?
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The Nature of Time
For years I have begun essays on the nature of time, become frustrated, and left them incomplete. I'll try again now as an introduction to the "new" Curbstone Critic blog. Take my word for it, serious stuff like this will only make rare appearances on these pages.
What is Time?
Is it real, or just an illusion?
Why does there appear to be an "arrow of time" in both our personal lives and in the universe as a whole?
Is there any way to make any sense at all of the concept of time? We experience three spatial dimensions in our universe; up-down, right-left, forward-backward. But we also put a sequence to events that occur; past, now, future. But these are human language terms. We say we know about the past and we don't know about the future. The "now" I am going to skip for the moment because things become a little sticky when we speak of "now".
In classical physics the units of measurement are grams of mass, meters of length and seconds of time. These are incredibly blunt intruments of measure, yet they can send spacecraft to land on an asteroid millions of miles away, or be accurate enough for a satellite to tell you what your position is on the earth's surface within a foot or two. And yet, thiose measurements are as far away from the basic units of what makes up the universe as many times the number of seconds that the universe has been in existance 14 Billion years (or 10^17 seconds).
For lengths the ultimate small is 10^-33 cm. For time, the shortest instant is 10^-43 second. And yet, there was a time=0 at the beginning of the universe - when the cosmic clock began ticking. What was before? Negative time? Nothing? Or something else that is a mirror image of what we see today. We can never know.
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