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Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we c
by gasull 16y ago
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?
I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time.
Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
- rorrr 16y ago> Before Big Bang there was no movement Prove it. It's possible there were other universes. > there was nothing to measure time with There was nothing inside the universe to measure time with.
- TGJ 16y agoWait, this guy tries to go deep and gets downvoted, while "Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either." Gets 5 upvotes? That makes about as much sense as this article.
- brc 16y agoTrue but if I travel away from a clock at light speed, time doesn't move anymore but I'm still moving. Personally I like the idea that the big bang is a cyclical event - the universe expands until some point, then it collapses again. At some indeterminate point it expands again. Whether or not Earth gets recreated is for someone else to ponder.
- thret 16y agoNietzsche did, the concept of Eternal Recurrence is the basis of his philosophy.
- nphase 16y agoPeriodic movement is what we use to measure time, yes. But I can't imagine that time is simply a human abstraction. Just because there's nothing to measure time with doesn't mean time doesn't pass, right? My brain doesn't like the idea of time in the context of relativity. Just because the relative (nominal?) measure of time changes as the forces of the universe may or may not cause it to doesn't mean the absolute (real?) period I wait for the train every day changes. Just because the clock stands still while you're moving away from it at light speed doesn't mean "time" hasn't been spent moving away from it. (I use nominal and real because, oddly enough, economics is the closest thing I can relate this to.)
- kingsidharth 16y agoI can't agree more. What I see time is as 'infinite now'. That's all that exist. There is now, now now now now now & now... We think it's tomorrow in Australia already but it's now. I can imagine that there was 'now' before Big Bang, since Big Bang happened in the now.
- fooandbarify 16y agoIf a tree falls in the forest... I love to see the connection between science and philosophy. I used to see philosophy as useless, and in modern practice it often seems that way, but I think it's fair to say that all science has philosophical roots - in this case, what is time? Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? What about space? Another dimensional abstraction? It becomes a semantic argument. A valuable one, but still - it is quite possible (probable?) that all human understanding is an abstraction of sorts. The fun part of engineering is learning to build stuff using the abstractions that we have experimented with enough for their behaviour to be predictable to some extent.
- silvajoao 16y agoBefore Big Bang there was no movement How was the Big Bang triggered then?
- EliRivers 16y agoLet go your preconceptions; cause and effect, this "trigger" of which you speak, is an idea you have built living in this universe with these physical characteristics.