Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Two-timing time

The previous essay identifies time as a direction in four dimensional space. This comes most natural to us as we experience our existence as evolving over time and moving through a three dimensional space. All our lives we are imprinted with the idea that we and all other things move about under the influence of a set of forces. We assume that the past does no longer exists and the future only becomes real when time flows into it. We never even contemplate the fact that this is just a model describing our experience of reality and not an unquestionable truth. But why should we? It seems to work.

Well, I like to question it anyway because it is fun. I have questions and they are not always easily answered. Real scientists probably have the same problem as they, on numerous occasions, caused some notable shifts in how we look at our reality. The simple universe described above does not correspond with the fact that the GPS system in my car needs to take relativity into account in order not to produce significant errors, a single particle evidently can experience interference with itself, where ever I would be in the universe I would always observe myself to be at the center of cosmological expansion and the most fascinating fact of all: that cosmological expansion is accelerating.

In the following essays I will revisit time and consequently space many times. I am not saying that the conclusion I previously reached was wrong but I intuitively feel something is missing. It is still not explained what a moment of now is. Also, even though I described that without events or spatial change an observer would not experience time and space, we still can quite easily imagine a space with objects in it that is completely frozen. A space with no change and consequently no observable time and spatial volume. But that does not mean the space and the objects it contains do not exist! There seems to be a time of existence, another aspect of time that we did not yet consider but certainly is not the same as clock time.

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