Infinity 2=time

I'm driving a car now, but if time is an illusion, so many questions. Can you grasp we're born and dying simultaneously along with everything else? If Time is an illusion, when we die, will we just literally be born again to repeat our lives without changes? Also it seems wrong if so for physicists to ever say what will happen some day, if they know it already has or hasn't.

context

I'm pretty sold on the idea of time being the 4th dimension, and we are 4 dimensional creatures, so we can only sense it in the limited forward-motion existence we experience without manipulation.

Manipulating time will rely on if/when we make a fundamental discovery that will allow us to step outside or above the dimension of it. Teleportation seems like a half-step in the right direction.

Gravitational forces must be involved, as they lock us into a rate of existence that governs every molecule, in their mutual attraction, and their rate of biological decay. We also have to be able to operate independently of gravity for any serious star-travel or time-travel. We can exist for some extended period of time in zero-g, but both positive and negative g's of measurable strength can kill us.

All purposefully vague and perhaps ignorant.

Seems like a work-around could be in the area of cloning. If we are somehow able to isolate and replicate our thoughts, memories, and personalities into a recording, we could take clone cells from our bodies, frozen indefinitely, travel for a thousand years robotically, grow the clones on the other end as blanks, then insert our memory banks into fresh brain tissue. Time gets taken out of the equation to a large extent, because what's 1000 years in the Universe?

Clone cells frozen would be largely immune to gravitational forces. We would just have to harden the storage system and vehicle used to transport them enough to survive large gravitational events.

I watched the movie Interstellar for the 2nd time last week. They visited a lot of these thought-areas. Was better the 2nd time around, and likely will stand repeated viewing.

But I think it's likely there are near-infinite multiverses. Whether they hinge on individual choices, proximities to worm-holes, some temporal representation we can't sense, or are pure fantasy, I can't guess. And all those individual moments in time could exist simultaneously for everyone if they knew how to access them. No reason they can't.

Time exists because we give it meaning, but no matter what you're going to have some kind of definition of time... from one emergence of a big bang to the next, or being born/died, or from the start of the week to the end of the week, etc, etc, etc. There will be some measurable way to define time no matter how you want to define it. After all, the sun will rise then it will set, and once you start counting how many sunsets it's been since you've seen someone or done something, then you have a definition for time.

You've got to deep six your wristwatch
You've got to understand
The time it seems to capture
Is just the movement of its hands
John Barlow

Quote: Romes

Time exists because we give it meaning

Why would time only exist a human concept just because we measure it?

We also measure space as a distance between XYZ points, but changing our definition of that measurement does not change reality. The space that a 1x1x1 cube occupies in the universe does not change, no matter how we decide to measure it. Similarly, we assign arbitrary measurements to time (like the sunrise and sunset), but if we suddenly stopped measuring it, time would still move forward. We would still age. A ball dropped from 5ft would still hit the ground at the same rate. Time has to be some sort of intrinsic entity in the universe.

This is what made Einstein so famous....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

Quote: gamerfreak

Why would time only exist a human concept just because we measure it? ...

No, I agree with you entirely. I was more referencing the human version of "time" not "space time" as it's referred to in the scientific community. Time as we humans know it is very relevant to clocks, sunrises, etc, etc.

Think about trying to teach math to a dog. Not only can you not do it, you wouldn't even be able to explain to the dog that math is even a concept that exists.

Now think about all the things in the universe that humans don't know about, and can't know about because our intelligence prohibits us from even grasping it as a concept.

I am in the minority of physicists that believe that time "has an arrow" - that time progresses from the present to the future and that 4-dimensional space-time has the fundamental limitation that no physical system (or fundamental particle) can "move" backwards in time.

This actually has some profund implications -beyond preserving "causality.".

There is an excellent popular book on this subject: "Time Reborn" by Lee Smolin.

Quote: beachbumbabs

I'm pretty sold on the idea of time being the 4th dimension, and we are 4 dimensional creatures, so we can only sense it in the limited forward-motion existence we experience without manipulation.

Perhaps, but as long as you can't move between any two points in the (four) dimensions without moving through a connected set of points between them (i.e. you cannot just "teleport" from one point to another), you cannot go back in time, for a very simple reason; just as you can't walk through a wall, you can't go back some really, really small amount of time (say, 1/1,000,000,000 of a second) without also running into something in your way - namely, you, in that spot 1/1,000,000,000 of a second ago.

Quote: ThatDonGuy

Perhaps, but as long as you can't move between any two points in the (four) dimensions without moving through a connected set of points between them (i.e. you cannot just "teleport" from one point to another), you cannot go back in time, for a very simple reason; just as you can't walk through a wall, you can't go back some really, really small amount of time (say, 1/1,000,000,000 of a second) without also running into something in your way - namely, you, in that spot 1/1,000,000,000 of a second ago.

True. That's why I said we would have to be able to exist apart from the 4D temporal space in order to manipulate it. That will take a monumental primary leap in knowledge. If we ever are able to do it.

Surely you know the concept of time is simply an illusion made up of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW.