(Untitled)

[bassplaya]

A while ago I got drunk. Not real drunk, just drunk. I was at a party, and I dont remember how my mind got on the topic, but I suddenly saw a line in my mind, which I knew to be a side view of a plane (geometric plane, that is). On this plane were all sorts of figures moving. And I realized that time is an illusion

Comments

[neomancer]

I remember reading a short story or something that arrived at the same conclusion. Actually, it was probably a book. Anyway, the idea was that to stop time would be to destroy the universe, and to destroy the universe would be to stop time. Some guy was experimenting with time dilation and was trying to actually halt time for...a...time. I didn't entirely understand that part.

Anyway, what he neglected to think of was that when you stop the progression of anything, nothing progresses. The most infinitley small instant becomes eternity (but not really), and never gets beyond itself. Like what you were saying with the football field clock: the clock face is dependent on the movement of the gears, and the gears are dependent upon the progression of the hands around the face. Time isn't so much an illusion as merely a very mundane-ized way of describing the way everything behaves. Inserting your time-independent finger onto the clockface and halting "time" stops the gears, which can't get moving again when you remove your finger, unless there is some driving force that requires everything to keep going.

String theory has something to say about this, about how we wouldn't notice if time stops (and that it probably has many...times...over the course of this dimension), because collisions with other dimensions kind of jar the clockwork back into motion, like the finger flicking the hand back into motion.

At the very least, it's an interesting thought experiment.

PS: I'd like to point out that your conclusion "Time is little more than a measurement of movement" actually says very little about time, because you describe it in terms of time. Movement is defined by space, and therefore by time. In a way, trying to "truly" concieve of time is impossible, because we are unable to step outside of it. It's like trying to concieve of infinity: finite brains can't do it. We can think we've got it, but we don't. We rely on some logical fallacy of a neverending loop that we give up on (think the Galaxy turning into Galaxy turning into Galaxy scene from Men in Black) or we just explain things through the word "infinity" with no understanding other than relative greatness (ie, "infinity" is more than "999,999,999,999,999 or w/e).

RE: PS

[bassplaya]

Yeah, I was aware of that. A source of much mental frustartion, I assure you.