From what I’ve observed, nothing in nature happens in a straight line. There are lots of spirals, lots of crooked edges, but not once can I think of something ever going in an absolute straight line in the natural world. (Perhaps mathematical equations… hmmm…?) But really, the closer we look at things, the less there seems to be anything such as a “straight line” occurring in nature.
So, why do we believe that time is purely linear? The way humans think isn’t even completely linear. Thoughts seem more to be encapsulated in moments, points, than lines.
Still, things like the persistance of vision and so forth could argue for the linear way.
Ack! I don’t know. Anyone out there have/know any theories/philosophies on how time works? (I’ll be the first to admit that my approach leaves a lot to be desired scientifically.)
I kind of doubt this is going to stick around in GQ…
Doesn’t the Big Bang theory give more credence to the idea of linear time over cyclical theories? Current cosmological findings seem to indicate that a) the Universe had a beginning and b) the Universe’s expansion won’t fall back, but will continue forever. So, entropy will continue to increase and everything will gradually run down in a linear fashion, rather than going through cycles.
While I’m generally more practical/scientific than philosophical, I’ll throw in a thought or two.
Time is treated a linear because that is the way we perceive it, and things make sense that way. While thought seems non-linear at times, perception is never truly out of sequence. If the linear nature of time were merely an artifact of the way we think about time, people that had decided to think non-linearly would be all around us.
Those people, since they perceive the future and past at the same time as the present, would be able to tell us about it. No real prescient has appeared.
It is true that no scientific theory really explains why time flows in only one direction, and at such a controlled rate (in any one reference frame, of course), but we are still perceiving it that way. What else can we go on?
I don’t think time exists. It’s just a concept invented by humans to quantify the span of our lives. And no, I can’t really explain the concept of no time. I mean, just think of yourself, sitting there. You’re not travelling through time by the ‘second’. You’re sitting at your desk, looking at the computer screen. Tomorrow you’ll be elsewhere (hopefully), but you’re just in a differen’t spot. The imaginative concept of travelling back to your desk at the time you read this message won’t get you anywhere. AHHHH!
Time is a circle, a circle so large that all of what we see of the arc seems to be a straight line. we know nothing of the true beginings nor knowlage of the end.MTS
Yet we can alter the flow of time. If you go faster, or are subjected to a more intense gravity field, all processes will slow down, from aging to chemical reactions to radioactive decay. That certainly seems to indicate that time is real. Of course, no one has actually traveled at nearly the speed of light or hung around near a black hole, but scientists have carried out experiments like flying one of a pair of precisely synchronized atomic clocks around on a 747 and then comparing it to the one that stayed back in the lab, and the results were as relativity theory predicts. Similarly, particles with known half-lives will last a lot longer if they are accelerated to near-light speed in particle accelerators.
As a matter of fact, time isn’t “straight”, and no physicist will ever tell you that it is. You’ve heard that mass causes space to curve? Well, space and time are properly viewed as two parts of the same thing (imaginatively called spacetime), and mass curves spacetime. To get time to be completely straight, you’d need a universe without any matter, and while such a universe might be interesting on paper, it ain’t our own.
On the other hand, there is a good bit of evidence that time is topologically equivalent to a line, rather than being closed in on itself. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy is always increasing as you go forward in time, so you can always specify that some point is farther futureward than another. If you tried to make a closed loop out of it, you’d end up with a situation like Escher’s continually rising staircase.
Now, if you want to go discussing the linearity (or lack thereof) of consciousness, head on over to the Great Debates forum.
When Jim Croce sings that song he says there never seems to be enough time and this could not be farther from the truth, or at least the percieved truth. Time is lnear on earth innsofar that that is the only way for us to percieve it on earth. We live on a decaying planet and we are decaying beings and all that continues to happen to everything is death. Now I don’t want to sound like I am depressed because this is just a theory but the only reason we see time as linear is because that is how time works on earth. We are living on a spiritual rest stop or purgatory of some sort where time is unable to continue to replenish itself and therefore continues to decay. Time is the very thing that creates life and we are stuck in the one place where time is the biggest killer of all. Once an individual has reached a high enough level of awareness, this term is very sublective and could be substituted with any number of other terms, then when you die you will have enough consciousness to overcome the limiting ideas that we live by on earth and will be reintegrated into the time cycle, which is never ending, and will expierience true existence, the way it was meant to be, lol. It as James Brown said to John Belushi in the “Blues Brothers” “Do you see the light?!”, well do you?