Some thoughts

[August]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I am still waiting for someone to invent a device that can simply detect time.

I am not even asking to measure time, just detect "time".

How do you measure something without being able to detect it?

[TarJak]

Originally Posted by August

How do you measure something without being able to detect it?

With great difficulty, however you may be able to measure it if you can detect and measure the effects it has on other things which are more readily observable.

[Mittelwaechter]

By the way, this thread itself is some kind of time machine.

You can jump back to the original posting and follow the thread providing several conserved moments in time. You can travel along this string from pearl to pearl in both directions, reconsuming a small portion of reality at its recorded location.
The very same way as you did consume it the first time.

The documentation of information given at a moment - the storage of an event - seems to be the key for time travel.

If we were able to store all the information of our senses or sensors - all the locations of any objects in reach - and replay them with our device, we could travel through our recorded sections of time. Back and forward.

We would have to store and recreate the part of the universe we want to observe.
We could not travel back to Cleopatra, because we didn't record her existence.

During our trip we would miss the information of our real time string. To catch up, we would have to speed consume a record of our absence, until we synchonize with real time. Or we would have to accept a gap, but this is quite common I guess.

In real time we chose what string to follow and accept to miss the events of an other one. We chose to read this post and accept to miss the brilliant information on channel 9.

We obviously create a time machine without realizing it. All documentation, all stored information is a try to enable us to travel back in time. We have developed different languages and techniques to store "time" - "information" - "location" of relevance or importance. Everybody records his own experience and knowledge of the universe if he wants to. Our devices to record and replay grow better and better.

Uk and Plett were only able to remember the information their fathers had taught them and they could only tell it to their children.
Some generations later they invented writing and reading and were able to store small parts of information about their universe. Following generations could come back and read or "re-live" this experience. Gutenberg enabled us to store more information, enabled more poeple to store their personal experience and to share it with those to come. Paintings, photography and movies, songs and records, tales and books, harddrives and clouds - all to store and replay information of more and more complex, filled up and concentrated parts of the universe.

Google Street View is a sort of time machine of stunning quality. We may jump to a certain location and look around. Jump to a connected location and look around.
Thousands of CCTVs stored data are a kind of time machine. We have no common access to these records, but that's only an artificial restriction. We would need a common viewer technology to "travel in time".

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by August

How do you measure something without being able to detect it?

that is my point exactly.

We are talking about "traveling through" something we can't measure nor detect.

[August]

Originally Posted by Platapus

that is my point exactly.

We are talking about "traveling through" something we can't measure nor detect.

But we do measure time all the,... erm, time! Clocks, TDR's, sundials, hourglasses. All devices for measuring time.

[Red October1984]

Indeed...

[Mittelwaechter]

The circumference of the planet is about 40 000 km at the equator. Any location on the surface moves around the planets axis in 24h.
It moves about 20 000 km in 12 h when using the am/pm system.

Let's scale it down to your watch:

a 4 cm diameter x 3.1415 results in about 12.5 cm circumference. So roughly every centimeter a mark will space your marks into 12 hours.

We construct the gear to move your watches short hand those 12.5 cm in half a day (12h)

Now, what you do when kooking at your watch is scaling down your position on the planet in relation to its rotation, represented by the short hand of your watch.

You don't read the time, but you check your location in relation to the sun.

Edit: I guess mankind started with a constantly repeating phenomenon to be observed by everyone: the sun rising, travelling over the sky and disappearing under the horizon. The geocentric sundial positions a shadow in relation to the position of the sun.
The heliocentric system moves the surface of the planet in relation to the fixed sun, so the shadow represents the movement of the planets surface, the location of the sundial itself.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by August

But we do measure time all the,... erm, time! Clocks, TDR's, sundials, hourglasses. All devices for measuring time.

Well, to be fair, they're not so much measuring time as they are measuring the effect of time on other objects, such as the rotation of the Earth, the decay of matter, so on.

[BrucePartington]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Well, to be fair, they're not so much measuring time as they are measuring the effect of time on other objects, such as the rotation of the Earth, the decay of matter, so on.

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

[Mittelwaechter]

So what is the Matrix?

[BrucePartington]

Originally Posted by Mittelwaechter

So what is the Matrix?

Finally
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)

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Well, to be fair, they're not so much measuring time as they are measuring the effect of time on other objects, such as the rotation of the Earth, the decay of matter, so on.

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.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by August

But we do measure time all the,... erm, time! Clocks, TDR's, sundials, hourglasses. All devices for measuring time.

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

[August]

Originally Posted by Platapus

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

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

[Mittelwaechter]

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.