Why would you not call it “motion” if something is at one position at one time, and at another position at another time? Even if time is discrete, that would only cause this to fail to be continuous motion, but is it not still motion all the same?
Exactly! and No!
There is no motion in a movie, only the appearance of motion, an illusion. There is no time in a movie either.
The first frame of the first reel still exists as you look at the last frame of the last reel, and vice versa.
If time doesn’t exist, there is no time.
We see it, and experience it yes, but we can experience things falsely, i.e things that are not what they seem like optical illusions.
Time is a convenient fallacy and a compelling illusion, and useful too, so we pretend it’s real, just like Obama’s credentials.
Let “time” be a word meaning, in this context, “position on the reel”. Then, tautologically, the first frame on the reel and the last frame on the reel aren’t at the same time. The only sense in which they “exist at the same time” is when you introduce an external notion of time which differs from the natural one intrinsic to the reel, and then begin talking about existence within this (meta)time. But why bother doing so?
I might just as well say “There is no such thing as space/distance/location/position. Consider a one-pixel wide film of a camera panning across all the points on Earth; every point on Earth, when displayed, occupies the same location on the screen. The North pole, the South pole, Detroit, and Beijing all occupy the same location. Location is a myth! Everything exists at the same position!”. It’s the same switcheroo.
No more than motion consecutive frames of film is actually “motion.” It’s ultimately useful to pretend that things move and we are not just interracting with multiple discreet static universes, because well… that’s a hard way to go through life.
But I am not here to tell you convenient lies, but only to give you the facts. No time. No motion.
Multiple consecutive frames of film do exhibit motion, to the extent that index along a frame reel is considered time. At least, that is how I am willing to talk. I do not see the value in saying otherwise.
In any situation in which one variable is considered “position”, another variable is considered “time”, and the former is a varying function of the latter, I am willing to use the language of “motion”. Why not?
If the discrete movie frame sort of thing is all that the things which, in ordinary language, we describe as “motion” are, then, well, so be it: then that’s what motion is. It doesn’t mean motion doesn’t exist. It just has a different nature from what we might have naively thought.
There’s no need for time. You can describe the position of the first frame of the film precisely in 3 dimensional coordinates, and the last frame the same way. Creating a new coordinate system and a new dimension and calling it time is just making things more complicated than they really are.
No they don’t, and you can’t do it. Each point is a planck distance. Let’s say for example that you have a high res camera such that each pixel is only a planck distance in size. You take a picture of the first point and the second point and so on…
You can’t superimpose them on one another because the space is occupied. You can only stack one behind each other, which is really no better than side by side.
To give you another example, when you view two pictures together, you are taking advantage of the holes in the data, i.e combining the two pictures. To do this you either have to double the size of the combined picture or else leave data out and combine half of one and half of the other. What you’ve done is created a new picture, not made two pictures occupy the same space.
Sorry.
Acting as if we can say anything definitive about a “Planck time” is not so realistic. The fastest timescales we can measure in experiments are many, many orders of magnitude slower than a Planck time. Even on a theoretical level, I would think you’d need a theory of quantum gravity to make any definitive statements about dynamics where such a small time scale is relevant, just as you do to make sense of physics at Planck length scales.
Additionally, like I mentioned in my previous post there’s the issue of time and space being “mixed together” in relativity, in contrast to quantum mechanics. Again, I think you need a theory of quantum gravity to resolve this apparent conflict.
In short, claiming that physics has definitively established that time is discrete at the level of a “Planck time” is overstating our level of knowledge. Our current theories may break down at that level in quite unpredictable ways.
You can “consider” it what you want, or be unwilling to see it another way, or talk about it.
That is not an argument that makes it true.
Position is actually three variables. You can fully describe al phenomena with those three variables. You don’t have to make up a forth.
When you use a fourth convenience variable in a make beleive dimension you screw up your observations and get useless data.
My way is both more accurate and simpler.
“motion” doesn’t exist. It can’t without time. It’s something else. You can cling to a false convenience all you want, and it’s useful to do so in day to day life, I agree. However, if you want to think cosmically and accurately abandon the false comfort of the time lie.
Come on. You are taking the movie reel analogy too literally. Yes, actual movie reels position the frames spatially next to each other, but when describing the history of the universe, the slice at the year 1985 is not spatially next to the slice at the year 1986. Yet, all the same, there is some relation between them, which tells us 1986 comes halfway inbetween 1985 and 1987. “Time” is the word/concept we use to describe this ordering. This is a natural coordinate system, intrinsic to our having a concept of before and after and how much before and after. Or are you denying the concepts of before and after and how much so as well?
I don’t think you understood what I had meant to say (which is my fault for clumsy wording). I had meant you to imagine a movie which displayed each point on the Earth, one after another (so maybe it starts with the North pole, and goes to Detroit after one hour, and goes to the South Pole at 93 minutes and 14 seconds, etc.). That is, what we would normally think of as spatial position is corresponds, within this film, to the time of display. (Just as how the movie reel metaphor before makes what we would normally think of as time correspond, as far as looking at the tape stretched out in one’s hand goes, to the spatial position along that reel.)
Eh, three one-dimensional variables or one three-dimensional variable, whatever. It’s just semantic quibbling; it doesn’t change what I was saying. (In a way, this whole thread is just semantic quibbling, perhaps taken by some to have stronger consequences than semantic quibbling can actually justify)
How do you describe the difference between “John ate dinner an hour before he went to bed, and then went to the bathroom 15 minutes later” and “John went to bed two hours before he went to the bathroom, and then ate dinner ten minutes later” without involving (explicitly or implicitly) a dimension of time?
Put it another way: what more can the ordinary English word “motion” mean than “those things which are routinely described in the English language as ‘motion’”? And surely you are not denying that there are phenomena routinely described by English speakers as “motion”? Phenomena of various kinds which serve as the archetypes of “motion”.
Now, the nature of these phenomena may be different from what we thought, but that doesn’t make the word whose meaning consists of describing them suddenly turn semantically void. It still describes them, whatever they are. Perhaps ancient man thought water was a primitive, indivisible substance; then, it was discovered it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The response wasn’t “Oh, wow, turns out water doesn’t exist”. The response was “Oh, so that’s the true nature of water. Interesting…”.
I don’t think I get this – how does the notion of multiple universes even enter the discussion? I can’t see any ‘branching’, i.e. the possibility of multiple distinct outcomes, anywhere. You’ve got two observers who, depending on their relative motion, experience distinct notions of simultaneity. They clearly inhabit the same universe; you can show that by making them touch in the moment they make their observations.
In any case, in your view as well as in one without timesclices, to precisely pinpoint any event, you need four numbers – length, width, height, and time in the conventional picture, and length, width, height, and ‘timeslice-index’ in your picture; without the timeslice-index number, the event would not be uniquely identified.
What you end up with is still a four-dimensional spacetime, albeit, in the case of your model, one that appears inconsistent with relativity (another way to see this is that it appears your model can’t account for proper time, i.e. the dependence of the time a clock shows on its motion – take the twin paradox; what did the older twin do, hop through the timeslices faster than his brother? Has the younger twin gone through less timeslices? If so, were there then timeslices that contained the older, but not the younger brother?).
[Addendum to my last post: In specialized contexts, one may want to adopt an artificially formalized, perhaps very strict definition of “motion”. Fine, whatever. But A) this still won’t change the fact that ordinary language “motion” clearly refers to something that actually happens and B) many of the naturally employed formal usages of the term are not invalidated by your argument either (e.g., “motion” as any change of one variable in terms of another).]
You can use that same argument to deny the existence of space, too. Isn’t there such a thing as planck distance? Yet, obviously things move in three directional dimensions. Things can happen in infinitely small measurements. If you calculate the odds of a ball falling on a particular point on its surface, you get 1 over infinity, since there are infinite possible points on the surface of the ball. Yet when you drop the ball, it indeed falls on a point, Zeno be damned.
I used to know the name of the fallacy you committed, but I’ve forgotten. When I remember it, I’ll get back to you.
No true reputable physicist would agree that time does not exist.
ARTIST: The Guess Who
TITLE: No Time
No time left for you
On my way to better things
No time left for you
I found myself some wings
No time left for you
Distant roads are calling me
No time left for you
Da-n-da-n-da-n-da-n-da
No time for a summer friend
No time for the love you send
Seasons change, and so did I
You need not wonder why
You need not wonder why
There’s no time left for you
No time left for you
Yes, the Planck Length is 1.6 × 10[sup]−35[/sup]m.
Why do you throw “how much” in there? Just because it’s meaningless in terms of time doesn’t mean it won’t apply in other circumstances, i.e. three marbles, four marbles. “Before” and “after?” Yep. Meaningless.
It’s still not time, it’s position. All the galaxies, all the stars, all the planets, the film, the frame in the film, the camera, and the screen are in different spatial coordinates from one frame to another. Describe the position accurately and you have already perfectly described what you refer to as “time.” There is no reason to define it in terms of time. Doing so is redundant.
Sorry for the poor phrasing; by “how much”, I had meant “how much before/how much after”. Though it doesn’t matter, since you deny the meaningfulness of “before” and “after”.
(Why do you deny the meaningfulness of “before” and “after” again? What was the argument for this?)
(To put it another way: You invoked the Planck time earlier. But if there is no such thing as “how much before/how much after”, then what does the Planck time mean? If there’s no ability to speak meaningfully about temporal intervals and their sizes, then what are we doing when we say the Planck time is so-and-so many seconds?)