Time doesn't exist, clocks exist.

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You have one in your chest.

ruveyn

We don't, but if you start talking about how we replaced all clocks with giant cybernetic Cuckoos in 1977, then I'll know to lock you up.

We don't, but if you start talking about how we replaced all clocks with giant cybernetic Cuckoos in 1977, then I'll know to lock you up.[/quote

The heart is a complex oscillator. It is an electrochemical, periodic clock.

In addition to the heart the earth and sky are filled with gazillions of oscillators. Every atom is an oscillator. We are clocks.

ruveyn

Ok, but if we hold knowledge to the extreme skeptical standards found in the question, then even these can be doubted. Either the question is stupid, or it can't be given an affirmative answer.

UH OH! Fossils are radioactive. They are rather hot in fact. So if they
are radioactively decaying, how many years in the future will there be dinosaurs?
After the glogal thermonewclear war? Did they fall back through a wormhole
in and around the LAC's Higgs Boson?
We are seriously talking about Negative Time or something here.
I asked this before.
Why are dinosaurs bones so radioactive?
While Noah was building the ark, the Antediluvians tried to blow up
an asteroid with nukes? Or did they blow up the planet that used
to be in the Asteroid Belt?

Um... Most of us who experience time have a 32 to 40 millisecond "now".
The human brain learns at a nominal rate of 45 bits per second.
The length of the NOW is demonstrated by the way music sounds.
If NOW was infinitesimal then sound would feel like quick puffs of wind
similar to ocean waves when you stand in an ocean but it wouldn't
sound like anything.
If NOW was a minute long, then music would always sound like
someone was sleeping on the keyboard of an organ and we would
hear all of the notes at the same time and most music would sound
the same... like that.
The 45 bits per second learning, or reality interface, rate...
Implies that the singularity has happened already and
our computers are smarter than we are.
Apparently they are. They have fooled us into thinking they
are sick and need antiviral medication. I don't know why we
believe them. Machines aren't alive. They are also supposed
to be working all the time, but they don't do anything when
we are not around.

TIME. If we couldn't see stars there would be no year.
If we couldn't see the moon then there would be no month.
If we couldn't see the sun making a shadow on a sundial
then there would be no hours.
In the future when people live forever, there will be a power
source that makes light, probably electric or radioluminescent
but it will be always bright and sundials will not work. That will
be what we call the end of time.

This post has a cognitive dissonance point of view. You might
have to accept the ideas in a suspension of beliefs to follow it,
but that is not intended. I am mixing POV information together
to discuss time, not religion or science, so there's no point in
trying to unscramble eggs or something here. Respond about
time unless you know why dinosaur bones are more radioactive
than any living thing that size could ever be. Or whatever.

Small tidbit, but you would know that in our Western language, the past is "behind us" and the future is "in front" of us, right?

Well, for the chinese this isn't quite so. The past is "in front", because we can "see" it. And the future is "behind" us, because we can't see it. =/ On a philosophical standpoint, it does makes sense.... <.<

Yeah, I think there are a few more languages like that. Fun stuff.

Stephen Hawking says that as a "logical positivist" he can´t ask what time is just build theories in the form of mathematical models that contain time that if they are true will yield good predictions.

Tickin' away the moments that make up a dull day...

There is no now. There is only a length of time where the past and present are so similar that the difference can be ignored. By this logic, if everything was static, and at a perfect standstill, there would be no time. But as there is change, there is also time.

The way I see it is there is some thing like this:

----------------+--^-+---------- Where ^ is the current time, and the two +'s are the borders of the experienced "present." We accumulate enough data in the previous second to KNOW what will not change, what will change (and how it will change), and what can't be predicted in the following fourth of a second. This is because the matter in space moves through space relatively slowly. The movement in a very short amount of time is so little that things appear "symmetric." The best way I can describe this is to grab a random picture and two pieces of plain computer paper. Put the two papers on opposite ends of the picture and slowly move them closer to the center. The point where they meet is "now" and they are the borders of your imaginary "present." You will notice that the less of the picture you can see, the more what you can see appears symmetric; Predictable even. This is the thing we call present. Merely the (recent) past playing tricks on us.

Time is simply chemical process/thermodynamic relaxation. The big bang was the core, its been moving out as a bubble, matter constantly seeking a lower energy state and being allowed this even more as the universe expands and spreads thinner.

Not to say that it isn't useful for us in terms of contextualizing events but, I doubt its anything more mysterious than matter in motion.

There are harmonic oscillators at the subatomic level so it is not necessarily a chemical process. Chemical processes are about how atoms bond together through there electrical attraction at the outer shells of electrons.

A single cesium atom beats out a rhythm in isolation. That is not chemical.

ruveyn

You could take into account the buddhist point of view on time....which is time is an illusion. what happened no longer exists thus is an illusion...what will happen is only imagnination which is illusion thus all we really have is the present moment...the ever present moment and once that moment is gone...it is illusion. So it depends if you look at time from western point of view which time is linear or an eastern point of view which time is circular.

most of this debate has been from a western point of view, but from an eastern point of view...time is only illusion.

Time corresponds to actual physical changes in the world. These are not illusions. It is a fact that certain events occur before other events in the real world. This is the objective basis for ordering for for cause-effect sequencing in the real world.

By the way, why don't Buddhists live forever? Why do their bodies change from childhood to adulthood and from adulthood to old-age and death?

ruveyn

"By the way, why don't Buddhists live forever? Why do their bodies change from childhood to adulthood and from adulthood to old-age and death?

ruveyn"

Buddhists? Why don't we all live forever? That's what I'm planning to do!
Dead people aren't much fun. They're very ugly and always very boring.

You just hang out with the wrong dead people. Voltaire and Shakespeare and Feynman and Salinger and Roth and Asimov and Heinlein and a host of others are wonderful fun.