New science of clocks prompts questions about the nature of time

[WatchingOracle]

Hi everyone. Wasn't sure where to put this but it was an interesting read. Admin feel free to move this to where it is best suited I guess.

 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-clocks-prompts-questions-about-the-nature-of-time-20210831/

[spectre6000]

Beat you to it! Great minds think alike.

[WatchingOracle]

@spectre6000 Oops my bad then. I didn't see your post!

What I love is how this new atomic quantum clock they are working on basically makes all those dudes who complain about their watch gaining a second a day on a watchtime seem soooooo redundant.

I guess if you want close to perfect accuracy sync a phone or internet device with a timeserver tracking off one of those. Watches especially mechanical ones to me should be accurate to a limit but not fawned over as the be all and end all. To me the watches we repair here are more art pieces that have the 'added value' of showing the time given, they are so anachronistic for our society now.

[spectre6000]

My buddy works at JILA (one of the quoted outside experts is referenced at being at JILA). He built one of the experimental resonators under evaluation at NIST to replace the current atomic clock. It's 10KX more accurate. +/-1S per (the age of the universe). It's capable of measuring time dilation within earth's gravity well with, IIRC sub-1cm resolution. K-razzy. I forget the element they used, but it's set up in a laser lattice in a little (I think it was aluminum) box. Super cooled, all that jazz.

Agreed on the anachronism of the mechanical watch. They're still plenty accurate for the scale in which we actually live, and thereby serve a practical purpose, but the premium paid over a cheap quartz watch is for the craftsmanship, artistry, historical connection, and other esoteric reasons. 

[Nucejoe]

 In fundamental physics time is defined as " the amount of motion" . Time, space and energy are inter-dependent and constiuent elements of material existance. So time is considered to be an element, though it only exists if motion occures. This makes motion the very essence of matter,  not that matter is in motion or some motion is imparted into or imposed on matter, rather matter itself is the very motion.

Motion occures when a change from state 1 to state 2 has taken place,  for example you reading this stuff which you hadn't before, this is a change, so motion has taken place.

So time is the amount of motion, the faster you spend it the sooner you run out of the amount you have. I hope you now understand Einstiens a man on earth and the other on a spaceship speeding close to speed of light. the man in spaceship is simply spending this amount of motion faster and the man on the ground is spending his amount of motion slower. he is old when spaceship returns to earth, while the man on spaceship hasn't finished the cigarett he lit before leaving the earth.

Theoretical physicist have recently questioned the existance of time, not only the essentiality of time, but its mere existance.

 Is time nothing but our preception of motion?

  Our mind has to generate a feeling to understand, its only capable of understanding feelings. so when you feel like you are feeling nothing , your ming has generated a feeling of feeling nothing.

 In basic thermodynamics, Entropy is defined as  " a measure of randomness of a system"   Some motion has taken place to put eveything where it is, so randomness is indicative of a motion , therefore contains time. Every motion is added to previous ones,so entropy of the system be it universe or else is always on the increase that is; one stage has advanced to another so time has gone by and its getting older. 

I hope this helps.

Regs 

Joe

[spectre6000]

2 hours ago, Nucejoe said:

the man in spaceship is simply spending this amount of motion faster and the man on the ground is spending his amount of motion slower. he is old when spaceship returns to earth, while the man on spaceship hasn't finished the cigarett he lit before leaving the earth.

Interesting way of looking at it. Going to have to noodle on this one.

Since you went there, and I don't get to have these sorts of conversations often, I tend to think of it more in terms of relative transit of a photon a la the train car thought experiment. If your reference frame is moving at such and such a speed, a photon (as a stand in for what you're calling motion, and the article's author would call change maybe?, and I tend to call/think of information transfer) has to travel further in the direction of travel (from the perspective of the "stationary" observer) since the goal posts are moving than the other. If the goal posts move fast enough, the photon can't keep up, or at least takes much longer. Change can't occur any faster than that, so time essentially slows relative to an outside "stationary" observer. 

If space and time are one and the same, and matter and energy are similarly one and the same (I don't know what school of thought it is that holds that matter/energy is a feature of spacetime rather than some separate thing, but that's my personal bent), and motion is the expenditure of energy as it results in change, and time is change, then should it be spacetimematterenergy? Can E=MC^2 be rewritten to include spacetime/from the perspective of spacetime? And with that, I'm out of my depth... I fall down on the math...

[Nucejoe]

 I could have been more clear had I used the word substantive instead of essence.

Time is considered as substantive in Universal theory, it is one element of matter, so are space and energy.

The new idea that time does not exist, is about substantivity of time, it is questioning if time is a substance as thought of in Universal theory. so time could be a preception of our mind to sense motion. 

Relativity is easier to understand if you think of time as vector and not scaler, this also makes understanding spacetime curveture easy. 

Matter pops into existance as energy propegates in a field, so matter being time dependent is indisbutable.

As for the speed of light being the limit, it only applies to matter.  I have not seen any solid arguement that speed can't surpass speed of light. 

In a space containing nothing, energy is borrowed from nothing and immediately paid back, That means all material inteties have a clock, funny it will eventually run out of wind. 

Regs

[spectre6000]

I get relativity (general and special), spacetime curvature, time dilation, all that. I was mostly engaging on a subject that I am super interested in, but don't exactly get many opportunities to discuss. It's not the sort of thing that many people really understand, and doesn't come up often enough at parties to identify those that do.

In class, special relativity's time dilation was described via the example I mentioned above, and it's stuck as the lens I think through. I was mostly commenting on the alternative thought angle on it. 

The energy/mass spectrum as a feature of spacetime comment was more a joke than anything. Riffing on the "everything is a feature/one and the same with everything else" thing.

[Nucejoe]

3 hours ago, spectre6000 said:

I get relativity (general and special), spacetime curvature, time dilation, all that. I was mostly engaging on a subject that I am super interested in, but don't exactly get many opportunities to discuss. 

 Lucky you have better internet than I, If you haven't already, let the net bring you the latest in particle physics at LHC, theoretical physics, Quantum and any other subject in modern physics you like. 

 Science is progressing fast. When higgs postulated higgs field in 1964, he didn't think any evidnce of the field's existance might be found in his lifetime, same for higgs bosons nor he imagined its decay. His notes of theoretical analysis did not predict boson's decay. He could have accepted its anhillation but not decay.

 Am I right thinking you also are interested in cosmology? 

Best wishes 

Joe

 

 

 

 

 

 

[spectre6000]

3 hours ago, Nucejoe said:

 Lucky you have better internet than I...

 Am I right thinking you also are interested in cosmology? 

I wouldn't count on it. I live in the mountains, and the ISP infrastructure up here hasn't been touched since the late-90s. It's absolutely screaming right now, and I just clocked it at 1 mbps down, 600 kbps up. It's often around 56 kbps, and frequently 0. If I had to pin a mode, it would be around 100-150 kbps. We have a second geostationary satellite ISP, and it's occasionally better, but often worse; always super high latency. $150/month for crappy internet is not awesome. You have to deal with censorship, but speed is not something I likely have over you. Venezuela has the worst average internet speeds in the world (1.5mbps), and it's about 10X faster than a typical "good day" for me.

Definitely interested in cosmology. I often fantasize about going back tp school, and just going the academic route (assuming the current company cashes me out well enough for that to make sense financially), and that's one of the potential avenues.