3 ms·

Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole

dificilis 5y ago
Slightly hyperbolic headline. "There is no well-defined time zone at the North Pole". Also: "The sun sets & rises once a year." If you move 1 metre away from the North Pole, then the first statement is no longer true, but the second still holds. And "time" doesn't cease to exist just because you are standing on a large spinning ball on the part of the surface of the ball that intersects with the axis of spin.
simonblack 5y ago
What garbage. All timezones are a man-made construct. Time will continue to pass at the standard rate of one minute per minute, no matter where you are. The time by the clock on your wrist (or anywhere else) has no particular meaning but what you happen to ascribe to it.
- pyinstallwoes 5y ago
  Can you prove that time exists as an extant versus something that is mechanistic that tracks the interval of distance with a counter (derivative)?
  - pyinstallwoes 5y ago
    * I am continuing the support of the above statement from a different example. I apologize if I came off as confrontational. To note: I think there is an ontological problem in the overall zeitgeist of today within the realm of being able to and not be able to distinguish between ideas that are based in physical reality vs ideas based in mental reality.
    - simonblack 5y ago
      It's important to think of 'time' in two separate ways, what it does physically - it passes steadily; and the numbers attached to 'this instant' in time. 'This instant' has a physical reality, but what we call it is an entirely arbitrary man-made construct. That man-made construct is normally a count of some arbitrary period of time since some arbitrary starting point in the past. A good example of this is simply the number of the current year: it's 2022 in one system, 1443 in another system, 5782 in a third, and who knows what number in at least a dozen others, past and current, that I can think of off the top of my head. "Time is Nature's way of preventing everything happening at once." - unnamed comedian.

Slightly hyperbolic headline. "There is no well-defined time zone at the North Pole". Also: "The sun sets & rises once a year." If you move 1 metre away from the North Pole, then the first statement is no longer true, but the second still holds. And "time" doesn't cease to exist just because you are standing on a large spinning ball on the part of the surface of the ball that intersects with the axis of spin.

simonblack 5y ago

What garbage. All timezones are a man-made construct. Time will continue to pass at the standard rate of one minute per minute, no matter where you are. The time by the clock on your wrist (or anywhere else) has no particular meaning but what you happen to ascribe to it.

pyinstallwoes 5y ago
Can you prove that time exists as an extant versus something that is mechanistic that tracks the interval of distance with a counter (derivative)?
- pyinstallwoes 5y ago
  * I am continuing the support of the above statement from a different example. I apologize if I came off as confrontational. To note: I think there is an ontological problem in the overall zeitgeist of today within the realm of being able to and not be able to distinguish between ideas that are based in physical reality vs ideas based in mental reality.
  - simonblack 5y ago
    It's important to think of 'time' in two separate ways, what it does physically - it passes steadily; and the numbers attached to 'this instant' in time. 'This instant' has a physical reality, but what we call it is an entirely arbitrary man-made construct. That man-made construct is normally a count of some arbitrary period of time since some arbitrary starting point in the past. A good example of this is simply the number of the current year: it's 2022 in one system, 1443 in another system, 5782 in a third, and who knows what number in at least a dozen others, past and current, that I can think of off the top of my head. "Time is Nature's way of preventing everything happening at once." - unnamed comedian.