Sunday, June 16, 2013

Time

The following is not a scientific theory. It is just an ordinary person's view on the specific subject.

According to Wikipedia "time is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future and also the measure of duration of events and the intervals between them."

From ancient time, humans and even animals are aware of the events that occurs. The events are "day" and "night". Then as it goes along, they began to realize that there are "seasons" too. This is the realization of the thing called "time.

As history progresses, people began to realize there is a need to divide further the periodical cycles. Due to the need to know when to do what activity, they divided the season cycle into 4. They also use the phase of the moon to indicate the period called "month". Chinese still use the word "moon" to indicate such cycle.

A further division of the cycle called "day" (including "night") is needed. Thus the invention of several devices to measure it. Sun Dial, hourglass, water clock etc are invented in ancient time just to do this. Chinese have quite a different ways to measure time. Chinese divides the day into 12 and each period has a name. At night, it uses different name "更" to indicate time for rotating shifts. A not so accurate measure is to use incense stick to measure time by burning it.  In modern time, the atomic clock is used as a time reference.

Obviously, philosophers start to wonder what exactly is "time." According to Wikipedia, there are two schools of though. One is centered around Newton and the other is centered around Leibinz and Kant. My view is more towards the latter who holds that "time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable".

Time is a relative measure of cycles. Be it year, month, day, hour, minutes, seconds etc. It is in itself meaningless. Although modern science uses it for measuring other properties like frequency, velocity etc. It is by itself a non existence. The time that we measure is actually between moments of events.

Scientists usually classify time as the fourth dimension. Can it really be a dimension? some even speculated that there are parallel worlds where the specific time dimension evolves.

Time travel is a favorite subject. By speculating that lights take time to travel, it is thought that if we travel faster than light, we can breach the time constrain and actually ends up in the past or future. That is a big assumption that the moments in the past still exists or the future actually exists.

Do you know that we are already time observers instead of time travelers? Yes! its true. Due to the time needed for light to travel, we can observe events that occurred millions of years ago in far away galaxy. What we are seeing is not current time event. Obviously if you have a telescope that could magnify trillions of times, you could actually observe ancient aliens there too.

There is yet no way to observe our own past. Like time travelers, you must travel faster than light to a point of time at the historical moment you wanted and have a telescope that was previously mentioned just to watch your silly self doing a naked dance in Tahiti.

I must stress that the above paragraph does not change "time". It still progresses regardless of how fast you travel. What you did is simply chasing the image that occurred at that moment. Once the moment is over, it is over.




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