Time

[STR]

Sorry, black holes were NOT "invented" via math or by virtue of any other human effort or endeavor. Your hubris is showing. Black holes existed LONG before the Earth's crust cooled and will continue long after this world and its sun are gone (and, yes, I DO understand the concept of hyperbole and I note your quotation marks)

As a rule, I don't mock people's intelligence, but you're pushing it. If you can't grasp what I mean by "invent" than there is no point in debating anything else, because you're just not going to get it.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Imagination, intuition and speculation are extremely important elements in the quest for knowledge. You own example demonstrates that. And, yes, sometimes it can be fun or even advantageous to rearrange what is "known" in ways to look at possibilities in new ways. After all, your strict adherence to the "scientific method" would have resulted in this thread being a two sentence exchange:

Q: What is the nature of time?

A: We dunno.

END of discussion.

That is an utter misrepresentation of how science works.

Science goes far beyond merely asking and answering questions. You ask the question, formulate a possible answer (that's where the imagination, intuition, and speculation come in), then you create an experiment to test your possible answer. You'll notice that questions which cannot be given hypothetical, testable answers have very little value in science--questions like "does God exist?"

"What is the nature of time?" is a similar question. It has no meaning in and of itself. More scientifically-interesting questions would be, "Why does time exist?" or, more specifically, "What purpose does time serve in our universe?" A question which, I believe, was thoroughly answered elsewhere in the thread.

Now, with ALL due respect to you devotion to the "scientific method", how much thought have you applied toward the nature of time in the last eight days?

Your disrespect for the scientific method makes me wonder why you are even in this forum. The scientific method you're slamming made possible the computer you're using (electronics, engineering) and the message board you're posting it on (computer science).

BTW, you ARE aware, are you not that August Kekulé realized the structure of the benzene ring via an INTUITIVE LEAP. right? "A snake biting its own tail"--came to him in a day-dream.

Intuition is only valuable if it leads you to a testable hypothesis. An intuition, by itself, has no scientific value.

Kekulé also didn't just throw the idea of benzene rings out there, he argued for their existence based on the known properties of benzene at the time. It's not like the idea just popped into his head and he started pushing it without regard for how accurate it was.

 

[ThankQ]

Time is a function of the expansion of the universe and ALL of the objects contained therein (you and me included). The more dense an object, the slower it expands, thus "time" is slowed within a gravitational field. Enter a gravitational field suitably powerful (the event horizon of a black hole, for example) for all intents and purposes, time stops.

Time slows as an object accelerates because inertia slows expansion along the dimensional axis of acceleration.

It's really pretty simple:

Extend an object along the axis of length, it gets longer.

Extend it along the axis of breadth, it gets wider.

Extend it along the axis of height, it gets taller.

Extend an object simultaneously along all three axis' on (or perhaps below) the quantum level, it moves forward in time.


And, yes, this DOES mean the the entire universe and every object within it WAS physically "smaller" in the "past". Literally.

That was one of my personal Eurika! moments, when I actually realized that I am expanding. We tend to think of the universe all that stuff out there, and the expanding universe as all that stuff out there moving away from each other. One day it clicked. Of course, I always realized that I'm a part of the universe, but one day it just hit me that that means that I am expanding to. Everthing is expanding.

The universe is so freakin cool.

 

[Red Ranger]

Tempus fugit.

 

[ThankQ]

When you're having fun.