Thread: Seriousness The concept of 'TIME'
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Old 08-23-2010, 12:26 PM   #55
dsvick
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS View Post
Suppose you have a meeting arranged for next Wednesday, then you get an email saying, "Sorry to mess you about but we are going to have the move the meeting forward a day." Is the meeting now on Tuesday or Thursday.
Why is this relevant? Well there seem to be two main ways of conceiving of time - either as something we move through or as something that moves past us, and whilst most of us can operate with either conception we do tend to favour one or the other.
Mostly that's just semantics, or us people trying to organize it in our minds. To me, the concept of moving something forward in time meaning that it will happen sooner, implies that time, or future events, is/are coming towards us. If I'm moving toward something and you move it forward, that forward is in relation to my direction of travel, ion this case ti would be away from me, so the meeting would be Thursday.

Quote:
Originally Posted by cassidym View Post
It's a popular idea among conspiracy theorists that the problems continuing to plague the Large Hadron Collider at Cern are actually being caused by scientists coming back from the future and deliberately damaging it. This because they know that, if the Collider is ever fired up and does bang atoms together at close to light speed, it'll cause a black hole.
If that were the case and it were that important I'd hope they'd come up with something a bit more permanent

Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
It is an interesting conundrum which really crosses the line between between physics and philosophy as to why it is that we can travel in space, but not in time (other than in one direction, and at a fixed speed. General Relativity describes the universe as consisting of 4 dimensional spacetime - 3 dimensions of space, 1 of time - and there's nothing "different" about the time dimension; it's mathematically equivalent to the spacial ones. And yet we can easily travel through the spacial dimensions, but not at all easily through the temporal dimension. Nobody really knows why that is.
Maybe we just haven't invented the right vehicle to travel through time yet.
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