And some more random thoughts… I am now in a very contemplative mood, and thinking about this stuff.
Time is percieved in a really fluid fashion. I wonder how it is that it can possibly work, because time really does seem to change pace depending on what you are doing. How some nights at work never end, and others are almost tolerable. Or how a night up with someone you care about is so much shorter than a night when you just couldn’t sleep.
It makes one wonder, if we have such a fluid perception of time, that we could possibly have even come up with ways of measuring it. I mean, is it possible that time is just a fluid thing, ebbing and flowing, and our attempts to measure it are just futile efforts of a sort?
Who’s to say that it doesn’t actually speed up and slow down.
Do you watch that clock non-stop? And why is it that when you do, it slows down so much?
Interesting how that works, especially when something that is percieved in such a fluid fashion, can work so well when measured in a linear fashion.
I think everybody has it wrong because time is so important to us that we evolved a handy way of thinking about it. Time is really just the agency that orders causes before consequences. Since you experience time in your brain, and the brain’s only function as an organ is to create causes with consequences that benefit you, you need a sense of time - you need a handle that lets you deal with it. But the underlying nature of time is just this ranking of causes before consequences, and all the physical nuances like general relativity are less astonishing if you realize that causality is the only issue.
That’s wrong. General Relativity predicts (and experiments have confirmed) that time is affected by gravity in the same way space is. In fact, these relativistic effects must be accounted for in order to ensure the accuracy of the GPS system.