Intuitive Special Relativity - What Is Time?
In this series on intuitive Special Relativity (SR), I wanted to post a discussion on time dilation first but realized that I need to talk a bit about time before I do that.
But first, this is my introductory post on SR.
You may think that time has a past, it has a future and that it flows like a river or something like that.
This is wrong, especially the parts about the past and the future.
There is No Such Thing As The Past
First, the past does not exist despite what the movies and your intuition tell you.
The reason I say this is because there is not one single experiment in physics that has proven that there is a past beyond the fuzziness that you get from the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics and maybe some advanced quantum experiments.
There only exists the present moment. The now.
But what about photographs, movies, sound recordings and my memories?
These things all exist in the current moment. A photo is a physical artifact that exists in the here and now. Same with a movie, and sound recordings and your memories.
I think that you know what I am going to say next.
There is No Such Thing As The Future
Yes, the future also does not exist. There is no such thing as time travel.
Once again all we have is the ever evolving and fluid present moment.
Maybe physical systems can evolve because of the Uncertainty Principle but that is a topic for a different post.
I say that there is no future because there are no experiments that can measure what is happening in the future (beyond the fuzziness of the uncertainty principle).
But What About All Those Graphs With Time Axes?
Time is a very useful fiction that helps us do the math and to figure out how the present moment will evolve. Nothing more.
I do not think any serious physicist actually believes in a literal future and a literal past although they may sometimes forget or the natural language that we have to use may makes it seem like that.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post.
The past and the future are nothing but stories we tell ourselves. All we have is the present. Thanks for the post! I love this subject.
This is a little bit of a crazy concept... so what does this mean for particles that scientists are looking for that 'travel through time'!
I may do a post in the future about the meaning and implications of certain quantum experiments but that is well outside the scope of this simple post.
I just wanted to straighten out some layman misconceptions about the past and the future before I move on to explaining time dilation in SR.
"absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
You make a very bold statement in this post that undermines a very large chunk of theories in subjects ranging from cosmology to quantum mechanics using an absence of evidence argument. I am not a physicist, nor would I be interested in the physics that cares about the subject of time so heavily, but your absolute dismissal of a subject based upon such an incident shows a discrepancy to that of the foundation of the principles of science. For instance, the higgs boson was predicted in what? the 60's and it wasn't discovered until 2015... Gravitational waves had been predicted for over a century but were not confirmed, experimentally, until 2016...
This post is less science and more faith based. Science isn't a"I don't believe in something until evidence is brought forth" otherwise progress would never be made, science is instead having a hypothesis in a state of being until it can be accepted or rejected and get modified to go further...
So I point back to the quote at the top of my reply.
Also your images are improperly sourced, like legally you are liable with the picture of the Delorean.
My education is in physics and my career is in engineering physics so I completely agree with you when you say that science is about evidence and not belief.
This is why I say that there is no experimental proof that the past or the future exist beyond some quantum fuzziness.
The implications and meaning of these quantum experiments are far, far beyond the scope and intent of this post which is to simply straighten out some layman misconceptions about time.
As for the photos, I always search for images using the Google labelled for re-use search parameter and I also credit the source of the images in the photo. This is, I believe, within the recommended guidelines as given by the Steemit FAQ.
I am sorry that my post seems to have angered you that was not my intention.
I hope that my reply is sufficient for you to withdraw your complaint and your downvote.
Have a nice day. -Procrastilearner
Downvote was purely on the comment since you had posted it so early on and voted it high. I still left a cent there.
Post didn't anger me, anyways when sourcing photos its generally requested/required to source to the page with the license so that we can find whether is is CC0/PD, CC1.0, CC2.0, CC3.0, or CC4.0 and to make sure one of the terms of use is not CC{version} NC as then it is only available for non-commercial reuse. For CC1.0-CC4.0 you will have to actually attribute a photo differently (or else you could be liable) and in those cases, more is always better. Only CC0/PD do not reqire legally binding attributions, if that makes sense.
So common practice is for CC0/PD is just drop a link to it underneath the photo or at the end as image sources (i from wikipedia then the wikimedia page has the license)
So while these may be beyond the steemit FAQ, they are fully in place legally and especially with how last fall (September to December 2017) there were a few legal cases making public noise about something similar to this and as such... Sorry, this is a bit of a ramble.
Anyways, what I took from your comment, I made up for on my vote on your post (went from ~0.23 to ~ 0.41, 100% upvote)
Thx, I will look into this CC0, CC1 stuff and try to adopt it if I can.
Thx for the upvotes everybody