That just proves that every cloud has a silver lining! 
About 3:34-35. (twenty-five or -six to four)
Does anyone really care?
Are we sure nothing would happen? ISTM, if time is a fundamental part of the universe, then its cessation would be like the cessation of matter. Wouldn’t it result in an instantaneous rending of all matter and energy?
Were you listening to “To the Best of Our Knowledge” yesterday?
For those who weren’t, they were doing a program on time, and one segment was on a Russian pianist / composer who was afraid of time (since at an early age she realized that each second brought her closer to death.) They played parts of a really noisy piece of hers called, IIRC “After the End of Time.” It was clear that if she had ever taken a physics class it didn’t make an impression. Just goes to show you shouldn’t get science ideas from composers.
Because said rending would take time, no, there’d be no rending. Once time stopped, everything would cease to exist, instantaneously, sans rending.
Matter and energy could not “rend” because there is no time passing for matter to change from one thing to the next.
The second law of thermodynamics provides for an arrow of time (to distinguish past from present from future). Rending matter would follow this but with time stopped quite literally nothing happens till the universe is destroyed (assuming there is an “outside” the universe where time passed and could affect this one).
“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” John Wheeler
The quote continues: “Space is what prevents everything from happening to me.”
What a silly notion. Time-freeze can’t happen *all *the time. Time has to at times be time, at least sometimes.
Nah, he’s writing boring novels without finishing the series in hell, now.
Originally Posted by beo.thuck View Post
Does anybody REALLY know what time it is?
It is, not is. Its from a song.
“As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was
on my watch, yeah
And I said
Does anybody really know what time it is
I don’t
Does anybody really care
care
If so I can’t imagine why
about time
We’ve all got time enough to cry
Oh no, no
And I was walking down the street one day”
What I was (badly) trying to say is that time can’t stop. We agree. (I think)
It can’t stop (as far as we know), but a more interesting discussion is can it begin, and how? Can there be a ‘time before time’? Stephen Hawking seems to think so:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/62
This also stems from the notion that literally nothing was before the Big Bang, a question Hawking compared to asking what was “north of the North Pole”. Perhaps the ‘end of time’ will be the singularity that occurs with the Big Crunch, a singularity (like the Big Bang itself) theorised to be the ultimate fate of the universe.
There are things that could be meant, philosophically and meta-physically by “after the end of time”. e.g. If our universe collapses into a Big Crunch, some theorists have hypothesized that another Big Bang could result.
(Although this second Big Bang should probably be considered to be a completely separate timeline to ours…but I think it’s inevitable when speaking English that events are ordered and there’s an implied cause-effect sequence, because that’s how the language is structured. It’s hard to express other ways of thinking of time within our language.)
What, already? Man, I gotta go! I’ve got a date at half past the movement of objects through space in relation to one another!
Where would you have to be standing to observe time stopping?
There are, conceptually speaking, three ways time could stop.
-
Time could cease passing and never restart. Optomistically, everything would freeze in position ‘forever’, unable to move and unaware of that fact. Alternatively, space would ‘cease’ too when time ceased passing and that would be that.
-
Time could stop passing, and then start up again. Those of us would be blissfully unaware, though, because for any points in time that time wasn’t running at normal speed, our perception of it would be effected in a complimentary manner and it would all look the same to us. In fact the entire flow of time could be passing at an irregular and intermittent rate, like a record being played on a player with a dying battery, and while to an outside observer the result would be distorted to the record itself things are unchanged.
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Most of time could freeze leaving one or more things unfrozen. This happens all the time on TV, and typically they’re very cavalier about the effects of a (comparatively) high- or infinite-velocity person imparting staggering forces and impacts to everything they touched while time was “frozen”, including air. Alternatively, there could be another universe external to our own with its own separate timeline, inhabited by beings with the ability to observe our universe in the manner that we might observe that slowly-playing record. Such an individual might be God, and whatever other properties it might have it clearly isn’t all that interested in improving things on the record, since it doesn’t. It’s probably too busy scratching the record - wikiwikiwow!
No links to Casey and Andy yet? Y’all nerds are slipping.
Some physicists think time IS grinding to a halt:
Insufficient data for meaningful answer
The reason she wanted time to stop was because she feared death, so I don’t think she’d see the Big Crunch as a plus. Also, she seemed to be planning on hanging around to enjoy time ending. Nice try, though.