Exactly my thinking. We observe the effects, or the time pulses, from our perspective, which is in turn relative.
A rough analogy would be to compare the main 3 different temperature scales: where Celsius and Fahrenheit are relative to common things on our planet (water freezing point for Celsius, and brine for Fahrenheit), as opposed to Kelvin, where " absolute zero, the temperature at which all thermal motion ceases in the classical description of thermodynamics." (wiki).

While we have watches, we still don't have an "absolute zero" measuring system for time. And we may never have. For those who haven't viewed the youtube video I posted earlier, time has finally been determined to exist before the big bang.
The big problem is, all this is speculation based on clever thinking and mathematics. No tangible hard evidence exists for us, mere by-products of the vibration of strings. You know those delicious BBQ ribs and that ice cold beer you just had for lunch? They never existed, they were just string vibrations, and so are you :haha:

So what is the Matrix?

Finally:sunny:
I was hoping, itching, that someone other than me would thump that ball into the field. I loved the first movie. It is a spiritual story. Science fiction is just the background that makes the concept tangible to us unaware sleeping beauties. In the grind of day-to-day life, we tend to take things for granted, using ourselves as reference. We have difficulty grasping big picture outside references, they are out of reach for us.
I could imagine that while connected to the Matrix, our perception of time would depend on the time pulses provided by the Matrix itself. Remember Spectrum and Basic? We could write plain text code and define the amount of time a command would wait, or last. It's still done today, even monitoring how fast you repeat key strokes on your keyboard.

Everything is relative, even time.
Our perception of reality, and time, is dependent on the outside Matrix, as well as the Matrix inside everyone of us.
And you can choose to perceive time as a predator, or a companion (Star Trek - Generations movie)
How does one define reality? The sum of how the brain interprets the electrical pulses received from our senses?
Are we nothing but vibrations? Or individual pieces of software in a virtual world?
We do seem to exist, apparently...
We could even be living vibrations, called spirits or souls, and have been linked to a Matrix that makes us feel and believe we live in a material world, as the only viable way of experiencing specific things, enabling the other spirits outside the Matrix to better understand the Universe, or should I say, the Multiverse.

(cough cough....I gotta quit smoking this stuff)

Who is to say that things we see as ghosts or UFOs are not objects or creatures on a different string wavelength to us that just happen to vibrate at just the right frequency for whatever reason briefly enough to bleed through? :hmmm:

Well, it seems you've been smoking the same stuff I have...
Good stuff, isn't it:rock:

I'm really amazed about your response to my thought about a cake and time travel. We have been around this theory in many way.

I think it's a very interesting thing this theory about time travel. However I'm not that much into it like our friend Mittelwaechter is.

Markus

None of them measure time. All of them measure physical changes which some people have decided represented time periods.

This is why I am one of those people who believe that "time" is a human perception of a pattern of observable physical changes.

While humans may have similar perceptions of time each is different. That is why we make clocks -- so that we can sync our personal perception of time with that of an agreed upon standard.

But isn't detecting one thing by the physical changes in another thing a common scientific method?

Time describes the movement of any location in relation to a fixed position.

Platapus - you're absolutly on the right track.
Our personal experience of time may differ, we all know this phenomenon of slow flowing time while being bored or fast flowing time while being exited.
But we agreed upon a standard that describes our local position (on the planets surface) in relation to the sun.

That's why we would have to translate our concept of time for an alien that refers to his own concept.
The terran day is different to the aliens day.

Not sure right now (my location will soon move into the lit section of our planet), but I think we measure motion in relation to the sun.

Time is motion - commonly in relation to the sun.

Edit: our "regular" motion is related to any other fixed position (in the solar system).

We may move ourselves in relation to Dublin.
This motion in relation to the sun is called time.

Bingo!

Edit: Bingo? Wrong! My sleepy brain is trickin' me. I'll be back later.

Yes, Its the only way we determine the existence of planets in other solar systems as they are not readily observable from our location in space... at this time... Can we expect to ever be able to detect and measure time directly? I don't know.

Speaking of observing stars, there is another example of time travel. The light we see from distant stars and solar systems is actually millions of years old having crossed extremely long distances to reach us, so we are observing in some cases things that occurred well into the past when we observe pulsars and supernovae.

A story of time?

One Day is the complete rotation of our location around the earth's axis.
This is the basis for our concept of time. Our longitude moves along our latitude.

It started with the observation of a regular pulse: the sun rises, moves over the sky and sinks under the horizon every day - the stars follow a certain path too.
Living at one location - and the people were pretty local - it was a matter of practise to read the position of the sun. It was important to know how long it will take the sun to disappear, because darkness was dangerous and we would have to make it to a save place "in time". The stars told us how far the next sunrise was away.
We realized the shadow of a tree/stick moved through the marks on the ground around it. The first rather precise local clock was invented.

But the sun can hide behind the clouds and so do the stars.
I guess we observed, that water constantly dropping from the ceiling of the cave makes a repeatable rhythm. Dropping into a bowl rises the waterlevel to a certain mark over time. A stopwatch was invented.
The size of the bowl to be filled was variable, the drops could be counted. For cooking an egg to soft, the sun dial was pretty useless, but 85 drops would have been a great mark.

We started to abstract the daily rhythm into shorter pulses, to fit our demand. We became independant of the visible sun and stars - at least at our standard location.
With more mobility, longer trips and sailing across the seas, we needed reliable clocks to be carried around. A stick aboard a ship is useless as a sundial. Where is east or west for the correct setup of our mobile sundial? How to move the cave with the drops around?

Somehow we realised, we could use sand as a replacement for water. We let it flow through a little opening between two containers and made it a nice abstraction of the "time flowing".
Of course these first sand glasses were not made of glass. They were to be opened carefully to check the sand level.
It took centuries to reach a point, were mankind was able to build a mechanical clock. The first ones were huge and local, but we managed to make them portable. The were not very precise and we had to synchronize them regularly with the real local time. The bells of the church made us check our pocket watch to show the local time.

We worked on more reliable and precise time interpreters. It was very important for the naviagtion at sea. To check our local position at sea, we need a precise clock. Well, I guess I don't have to tell you that, Herr Kaleun.

There were no regulated time zones. Every major location - village or town - had their own local time. With a more global view we invented the grid of longitudes and latitudes representing the change of our location under the sun. The Greenwich longitude moves along its latitude around the earth's axis in 24 hours. Greenwich 12.00 o'clock AM translates into our given local time zones around the globe.

Over time - many rotations of our longitudes - we were able to build more precise clocks. Today we synchronize our computers and digital watches with the constant pulses of atoms. But while checking the time, we still check the position of the sun - or better our location in relation to the sun. And a certain amount of time is still an abstract of our longitude moving around the earth's axis. To measure time intervals is to measure motion, relative to a given location.

Never say never, but this special time machine we all are thinking of is impossible. We are commonly not aware of our own concept of time - of how it works. We are used to live with this translated, abstract view of time and its flow. Everytime we don't understand how something works we start to dream, to believe, to imagine possibilities. The evolution of god and our interpretation followed a similar concept.

We wish or want to believe, there is a way to travel back and change events - maybe mistakes we made - or to observe and witness the great moments of history we are told.
We dream to jump into the future to discover these awesome worlds we settled, the brilliant technics we developed, the smart way of future living.
So let's dream on, it doesn't hurt. One day we may be able to leave this cage of time concept and float forward and backward through space and time. Who knows?

Great post! Not sure about your sig though.

Time travel: the Holly Grail of Physicists.
I think of it as a pixel living inside a monitor. It will never be able to leave the monitor to look at it as a whole from outside. And if it did, it would no longer be a pixel. It would die as such.
However, time is a blessing, as it lends order to our universe. Without it, we would never exist. We are the universe looking back on itself.

Except that when in a balloon you can feel the wind. I did when I took my hot air balloon ride. Now what you feel is not the true speed of the wind, but the air was not perfectly calm in a hot air balloon.