Time?

[Conan_The_Barbarian]

alright so me and a friend were stuck in the car for some time, couldn't find anything on the radio so we decided to have a pointless discussion. Somehow or another the concept of infinity came up and he said nothing can possibly exist forever.

I refuted and said time has to exist forever and here was the point I made.

Time is the rate of change between things (things being anything). It is impossible for time not to exist infinitly because anything that existed without time would begin and end at the exact same yoctosecond thus having never existed so it is impossible to have a period when absolutely nothing, including time didn't exist because it ended as it began and began as it ended. On a line the difference between one location and itself is 0 meaning there is no change in position. So if the length of somethings existance is 0 it never existed in the first place meaning time has always existed and always will exist because the moment it doesn't exist is the moment it begins to exist again making its end impossible!

There of course is the argument that deals completely in the unknowns, that we beings of this Universe and reality are incapable of perceiving an alternative but that's always the last resort of scoundrel in my opinion, take a position that is seemingly irefutable unless you have a damn PHD in the subject.

He thought that was pretty solid argument and so did I, and philosophy or physics majors wanna rip it apart? I'd really like to see where its flawed anonymously so if this discussion every does come up again in real life (which strangely enough it does) and don't try and make a seemingly stupid point.

[evirus]

1. the problem is this

what your doing is similar to attempting to define nothingness exactly, or the "if a tree falls" question,

much like the answere to that it all depends on your definations to me sound is audable vibrations carried through air, if a tree falls obviously there scientific evidence to show that its fall produces vibrations that, if we where there would be detected by our eardrums

i hated the time parts of my physics classes because my teacher would say the most outlandish things example; reversing the rotation of the earth will reverse time itself.

i also dont get that whole outside observer aged by light speed travel BS if you sent a space craft to a location 2 lightyears away, traveling 1 lightyear an hour, after two hours(outside time) it would be there regardless of time dilation that occures to the travelers(inside time)

[qnr]

2. Well, he's right in one sense I guess, "nothing" can last forever, as long

as it stays nothing, which makes him simultaneously right and wrong.

Or maybe I should just be asleep.

[bridgit]

3. everybody knows that i don't know anything, but absent 'time'...

so-called time being a function of 'the observer' as in: parsed musings upon: sun goes up sun goes down over & over round & round, cosmological turnings of celestial placements and the like, where one could sit and watch the shadow of a stick in the ground as well go round & round and what would otherwise be used to note the track of the shadows edge from one point to the next?

a neutrino; exiting the sun while shining on the other side of the earth, passing through the earth and then up through a person's foot and through the top of their head and gone; tracks a path quick though it may be...how quick? how much...'time' did it take to track that pathway?

the big bang; it occurs, or so some have reckoned, when all the matter in the cosmos is once again pulled back by way of endless mechanical black holes and their nefarious, roving hungers; for all intent every speck of matter poised atop a point far, far smaller than the prick of a pin...though in the expanse of cosmological time immeasurable, that could be seen from afar, by 'the observer', over & over (if a long time in between by our standards) while making a sound perhaps not unlike a 'bug zapper' on a warm summer's evening = snap-snap-snap-snap; with time being each time ended...until it is spun out anew until it is not :shrug:

call it what you will, we call it 'time', but not imo because we are unable to conceive of another word for it. i think i understand what your saying, and i personally await the time when we are able to fold it back into itself, cause there's some stuff my sense it is, i'd like to have been able/or would like to be able to do at some other, or more advantageous time than i may be afforded otherwise :-)