On 9/23/11 8:42 AM September 23, 2011, Deepa Mohan wrote:
I am quite sure that this view of time, along with the other views
of time that we have good metaphors for, is quite wrong.
How are you so sure that "this view of time...is quite wrong"?
I feel it deeply. This might make me quite wrong and all the
metaphorical views of time quite right, but I, naturally enough, don't
think so.
I had an experience of the illusoriness of time when I was 18 that has
stuck with me. Whatever time might be, if it has any sort of existence
outside of the human construction of it, it's not in the cardboard box
we label "Time."
If I were to say that time is inextricably linked to change and motion,
that it cannot be separated from the dynamic properties of the universe,
that there is no way in which it is static, am I saying anything at all?
And yet all of our metaphors for time have a sense in which time will
hold still so we can capture an instant of it. Time never hold still,
and we can't catch it. We can't turn back the clocks or arbitrarily move
to a different place in it because time doesn't work that way.
Prior to the invention of the calculus, we had no good way of thinking
about dynamic systems. We needed those deltas and epsilons and being
able to ask the question "okay, so we can't divide by zero, (or take
instantaneous velocity, etc.), *but if we could*, what would the answer
be?" before we could properly think about systems that include change.
This allows us to think of systems that include time, but it doesn't
allow us to think of time itself.
I think we haven't yet invented the mathematics that will let us truly
make sense of time. We don't yet have a tool that makes time accessible
to our minds. Relativity suggests strongly that time is weird stuff, and
it gives us a starting place for thinking about time, but it doesn't
really give us a map of time's territory.
My suspicion is that time is an artifact of another deep property that
we haven't yet identified and in order to understand time, we need to
understand that deep property, whatever it is.
I realize this is worth what you paid for it. :D
--
Heather Madrone (heat...@madrone.com)
http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its
best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
- Martin Luther King
