Smallest slice of time

Are these related to buckons … the lapsed time between when the boss stuffs up and when they pass the buck onto you?

But what is it measured in smoots?

your humble TubaDiva

The Harvard Bridge is 364.4 Smoots plus one ear.

Cite

The smallest increment of time is a “minnowsecond”, that’s the amount of time between when you let go of a car door and when you realize it’s locked and you left your keys in the ignition. :wink:

So is Oliver Reed Smoot of Harvard Bridge fame any relation to George Smoot, of COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) fame?

I’d always heard that as an “ignisecond.” :slight_smile:

A Dentisecond is the gap between biting into a wild-pheasant burrito and, finding an obstruction, thinking of your dentist. Know the feeling? Yeah, me thoo.

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Easy. Time is incremental. We just experience it continuously (barring things like mind altering substances and death).

  • Mark

Check out the following for thoughts on a descrete cosmos:

A NEW COSMOGONY
by EDWARD FREDKIN
Department of Physics Boston University
Boston, MA, 02215, USA

http://www.im.lcs.mit.edu/poc/fredkin/New-Cosmogony

-hyjynx

Furthering that, I’d always heard “ohnosecond.”

I believe that this is in fact the theory(?) of continuity, which is necessary for our understanding of calculus. Limits, integrals, and all that stuff would be pointless without continuity. A finite set of numbers would mean that those calculus courses I took were a complete waste of time! Say it ain’t so!

On this topic,here http://www.uvm.edu/~nvenet/pages/DedekindStory.html is a snipit I just typed up from a really great book about math called “Tour of the Calculus” By David Berlinski. This particular segment is his conception of Dedekind explaining how he has come to understand continuity. Check it out if you’re interested.

Here’s the best me and my sleep deprived brain can do…

Zarathustra posted earlier something from Xeno…the tortoise and achilles whatever thing. Xeno’s paradox eventually has you arrive that motion can’t exist. (Xeno’s paradox is similar to the tortoise and achilles thing. Basically every time you move a foot, before you do you move half a foot. But before you move half a foot you move 1/4 of a foot and so on. So eventually you arrive at 1 divided by infinity which is zero. Which means motion doesn’t exist) However, Xeno’s paradox is broken by the concept of space being quantified. In other words, there is only so small you can get which is probably those Planck distances you guys were talking about earlier. Space and time are together space-time so it’s my assumption that time is quantified as well. But there’s really nothing to prove that either are quantified. So an instant is either no time passing at all or a planck unit of time passing. I personally lean towards the planck unit thing, mainly because motion appears to exist. Ok so please hit me with a rock. Bye.

When I was in Junior High (1953 or '54) I read an article that said “they” had just established an official definition of a jiffy as the amount of time it takes light to travel 2 cm. Even then, I wondered why 2 and not 1? Then I figured there must be some English people involved. Do any of you remember encountering this definition?

Zenster, the easy answer to the question of whether time is continuous or particulate is “yes”.

It’s probably like light in being ambiguous. I think that’s God’s (or Nature’s) way of allowing us to use it either way we need it. It’s still up to us to figure out how.

By “vice-versa”, do you mean “pick the first point in time when the tire is not in contact with the ground, then you could not find a last point in time when the tire is touching”? You can’t pick the first point in time the tire is not touching. If it’s not touching, it must have some height. If its motion is continuous, it must also have had half that height at some earlier time. But this contradicts the assumption that we’ve selected the first time the tire isn’t touching, so there is not such time.

Oh come on. Someone has to know this! Don’t make me start a new thread!

The resolution to Zeno’s Paradox has nothing to do with quantization of space or time. It’s just calculus, and it works just fine with continuous positions. Yes, you have to make an infinite number of intermediate “steps”, but those steps are all infinitely small. It all works out in the end, just like any non-philosopher could tell you in the first place.