July 25, 2015
Cal Page
This document will make the case that, at a fundamental level, time is not a fundamental unit. Instead, it will be argued that the concept of time is added by the human consciousness.
Any observations we make are first filtered through our brains. Our consciousness sees something happen, then something else happens. We ask ourselves why. One convenient explanation is that a thing called ‘time’ as advanced. What we saw happened in the past, what we see now is happening in the present, and what will happen will be in the future.
Convenient? Yes and quite useful for our organism to survive. We see a tiger jump out, and predict its path to avoid it in the future.
But our concept of time is just that, a concept we added for our evolutionary survival.
So our science begins to look at the very small. And, naturally, we took the concept of ‘time’ with us in this exploration. But is ‘time’ really there? Probably not. Do you think an atom (or whatever) really looks at its watch to see if it should decay? No, rather some confluence of events makes the decay the most likely outcome.
Later on, when we look at atomic decay, we add the concept of ‘time’ and say such things as ‘well, the ½ life is such and such…’
‘Time’ is a very useful concept but must only be applied in an intelligent manner. For example, if we want to know when a train will arrive, we can use ‘time’ and calculate it. Time can be thought of as a way to predict the past and predict the future.
But if we try to use ‘time’ to fundamentally understand the locomotive that’s pulling the train, we will be led astray. From the locomotive’s point of view, some chamber has high pressure and that pressure is converted (instantly), to a torque on the wheel, which drives the train forward. Time simply isn’t involved. One instant passes, then another, then another. We, the humans might argue that time connects these instants but it does not. Instead, entropy is increasing from instant to instant.
Perhaps we need two concepts of time. The first being math that can’t use time, say ATIMEL. The second is for every day math we use for predictions, say TIMEL.
Mathematically, we can use the nomenclature [] to represent the yet unknown action as a replacement for dt.
dx / dt becomes dx / d[]
Do you think you are watching time advance when you watch a motion picture? You might, but if you look deeper, you are seeing a series of instances presented to you brain. Your brain, in turn, connects this series of instances into time.
The same thing happens when we observe nature. It presents a series of instances, and our brain dutifully connects the dots, and threads it all together using the concept of time. Unfortunately, our mathematics follows suite and we try to impose time as a fundamental of nature, which it is not.
Suppose a creature that lived in a 1000x time frame from ours watched one of our movies? First, they would think it was pretty boring, like us watching grass grow. It would take over 1000 hours to watch at least. And let us say the movie was of someone dropping an apple. It would fall rather slowly. But, these creatures did match the math to the apple, they would realize we were in a larger gravitational field, ie, that our time were dilated by it.
Planck Time, or the smallest time possible has been calculated at 5.4x10-44 seconds. Well, you can’t have linear time and have a discontinuity in it at the same ‘time’, now can you? One way out is to get rid of time entirely to describe fundamental processes.
One could argue that time can be linear and yet still have a minimum by looking at the Kelvin temperature scale. It’s linear but has an absolute minimum. However, I would argue that temperature is not a fundamental unit of matter, rather that it’s a convenient measure of atomic excitability, ie what is the probability of an atom appearing at one place as opposed to another.
We should re-look at our fundamental equations of nature and remove the ‘t’ or time variable. For example, ‘c’ or the speed of light should be derived from non- time dependent variables and parameters.