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#37442 08/03/01 05:32 PM
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Saint Augustine said, "What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled."

...and is time, by definition, linear?


#37443 08/03/01 06:24 PM
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I have never heard any suggestion that time is demonstrably lacking in uniformity. The Almighty seems to have a steady foot on the accelerator pedal.


#37444 08/03/01 10:03 PM
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Is time linear? I'd have to back up a step and ask if time actually exists. Might it be an articifial construct of our meager minds? I also think we'd be hard pressed to actually find much in nature that is linear.


#37445 08/04/01 02:15 PM
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The notion that time does not exist is one of the hot topics in physics these days. See The End of Time : The Next Revolution in Physics by Julian B. Barbour.

I had started it but laid it aside for other pursuits. I intend to get back to it as time permits.



#37446 08/04/01 02:30 PM
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But if time does not exist, how will you get back to it?


#37447 08/04/01 04:22 PM
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if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled

According to Prof Urban Chronotis, of St Cedd's, Cambridge (UK) time is something that humans invented in order to stop everything happening at the same time.


#37448 08/04/01 04:57 PM
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Was that Prof's mother named Chronometer?


#37449 08/04/01 05:20 PM
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"If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you wouldn’t want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place."


_Mostly Harmless_
Douglas Adams {mhrip)





#37450 08/04/01 06:47 PM
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Time is a reflection of mathematics and a function of perspective (amongst others), so it can be linear.


#37451 08/04/01 07:28 PM
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Musick writes that time can be linear.

I don't dispute this point at all. To assert that something cannot have a certain attribute defies conventional rules of logic and proofs. I don't mean to defy probability by saying that time is not linear. I merely point out that we'd have a heck of a time proving anything about something we aren't sure exists in the first place.

But then again, after rereading a little Rene Descartes, I think perhaps this Internet/internet is just a boogeyman and the great master is tricking me into thinking I'm typing.



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