Time is just another dimension, right? Humans simply move along the axis of time in a straight line in one direction.

Now here's the question: what if there are other being(s) that can move along the axis of time in a different direction, or at different rates (not necessarily God, just other organisms in higher dimensions). Would that then be classified as a different perception of time? We humans, trapped in our universe, could not perceive the higher dimensions (like a two-dimensional being cannot perceive the third dimension).

Not only "organisms in higher dimensions" can move in time at different rates, humans can too. I strongly encourage you to go to wikipedia and read about Einstein's theory of relativity. Essentially, as an object (including human beings) moves faster, it moves through time differently. One of the usual examples given is to suppose that there are a pair of twins on earth, and one gets in a spaceship and flies away to a star at relativistic speeds. For the twin on earth, fifty years may pass, but when the twin in the spaceship gets home, it seemed to him that only ten years passed. The reason we don't notice these effects is because we move so slow. The "universal speed limit" known as the speed of light, is 186,000 miles per second. Gravity is also known to cause time dilation effects, but since everyone around us is under the same gravity, we dont notice that either.

Just to say If time loops then it would end the way it started. Which also means history would literally repeat. Meaning all our progress and work is literally for nothing. Although as I said before this is assuming that time loops and constantly goes through a repeating cycle never truly beginning and never truly ending thus making it in a sense infinite. This though maybe an actual theory but this is also a personal belief that time just starts over at a certain point.
More than anything this is something to think on not except as fact. I'm not trying to present this as fact only as something I personally believe and think is interesting to ponder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA

You may be confusing "time looping" with the physical universe looping. Even if the universe explodes, contracts, and reexplodes repeatedly in exactly the same way every T hours, the time of the universe could still be proceeding as usual, forward. The unvierse could simply explode at time = T, time = 2T, time = 3T, ect, where all times are positive.
If time actually loops, the end of time may be nothing like the beginning of time, and if there is some physical mechanism inherently linked with the looping of time the universe may not necessarily repeat its physical motions exactly as it had the time before.

I would also hesitate before believing everything in that 10D video. To me it seems silly to visualize 2D as a "split" and 3D as a "fold" when we can simply actually see in 3 dimensions. We can't visualize 4 or more dimensions of course because our eyes and brain are only built to see the 3 spacial dimensions around us, but we can easily represent 4 or more dimensions mathematically with vectors. Certain properties of the physical universe, like the curvature of gravity, or the electromagnetic field, ect, may be more easily represented in a non-3-dimensional mathematical space, but that doesn't mean that the universe is "10 dimensional" or anything silly like that, it just means that those phenomena have higher dimensional properties. Maybe after we find all the physical properties of the universe and categorize all their representations we just take the max of the set and call that the dimension of the universe. That's probably a looooong way off though.

BUMP FOR THE GREATER JUSTICE

I discovered a better way to articulate my argument that time with no beginning can't have an end. Imagine that time is a a row of dominoes. Knocking down one domino over cause the next domino to fall. For the sake of the analogy, falling dominoes represent the passing of time. Now, say that domino x is the last domino, the endpoint. Before domino x can be knocked over, domino x-1 must fall over. Each domino before it must be knocked over. Since each domino is an infinite distance away from the initial domino, domino x will never be reached because there is an infinite number of dominoes that must be knock over first.

So, to reach the end of time, an infinite amount of time must pass first. Of course, this can't happen.

But, you don't know if there is an infinite amount of dominoes. Actually, the amount of dominoes is unknown, so you're example is flawed.

The assumption that there are an infinite amount of dominoes is implicit due to the "time with no beginning" part of his statement.

Oh you're right. Sorry ducky. I'm on fire today with missing parts of people's posts.

I think one thing that this argument is missing is guns and titties. But apart from that, there is another thing:

Every individual experiences time differently. Hence the time-old adage of 'time flies while you're having fun', or other anglophonic metaphors such as 'in the blink of an eye'. What causes our experience of time to fluctuate so wildly? How is it that when I'm playing a game, half an hour can pass really quickly - yet when I am working a 12 hour shift, the last 20 minutes feel like two whole hours?

I beleive time HAS HAD a beginning and I am uncertain as to whether or not time will have an end.

In this sense, imagine a 3-dimensional graph with 'x' leading away from you, 'y' leading to your left and right and 'z' going up and down. Such is reality. A room has a couple of walls (X and Y), and typically these walls have a height (Z), which give us our floors and ceilings.

But there is (as mentioned previously) a fourth dimension of 'Time'. I would argue that you cannot 'plot' time into this 'reality graph', because in 3-dimensional representation you cannot have a 4th dimension.

Instead imagine a series of power-point slides, or frames - each depicting this X, Y, Z room of ours. And each 'frame' or 'slide' represents a moment in time. The first frame can be as infinitely different to the last frame in the series and there is an infinite number of frames between first and last. The reason that there is a 'last frame', is not because Time has ended, but because time is ending in each and every nano-second that passes.

This throws up the interesting issue of how linear and progressive time actually is. Sure, we have those dreamers who imagine us creating a machine and punching in a date and travelling backwards in time... but hell, lets be realistic here. In the 3 or 4 minutes it too me to write this post, each key-press i made was signalling another consignation of time to its grave. It was ending, time itself, time as I experienced it, time as it is for everyone at any given moment ended. But, even before that one 'moment of time' had ended, another had already begun. This is made possible only through the incomprehensible speed of light and the total inadequacies of the human body to 'observe' time.

It is impossible to say that 'Time' will end. Just as it is impossible to say that 'god exists' or 'it will rain 34 milimeters on thursday the 17th of december'.

I beleive time began moments before the Big-Bang occured. And the reason 'Time' began was because the Big-Bang (an X, Y, Z event of gigantic proportions) could not exist without the 4th dimension to encapsulate it (Time).

Another question I have is:

Is it the 'passing of time' or our 'experience of time' which makes us aware of 'time itself'?

edit: I phrase my arguments simplistically and in a straightforward manner. I try to punctuate and structure my points as best I can. But, ultimately, I know as much about physics as a cheese-grater knows about theological debate.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 10 2010, 11:24 pm by Cardinal.

The most interesting part of that paragraph was undoubtedly this:
Or rather, the implications of discretizing time. If you suggest to describe time this way, or as in ducky's analogy with dominoes, you're dividing time into discrete elements with separation between them instead of the continuum we usually refer to as time. Some interesting questions would arise, such as: "what happens between two discrete times in the universe?" and "Is space discrete also?" Supposing each element of time and space was on the order of 10^-1000 or something, we'd have no way to tell the difference between discrete time and space and continuous time and space.

I wasn't actually suggesting time was indivisible, like an atom of matter. I was just using an analogy to explain why time with no beginning is inherently infinite. I think treating time as a discrete unit doesn't make any sense. What would animate things between slides? If things are unmoving in one unit of time, then why do they move in the next. Movement wouldn't be continuous, but rather jumpy as objects would teleport to their location in the next slide. I think a better way to understand what Cardinal says is to take each slide as just a freeze-frame. Not an discrete unit of time, but just an image of space at a particular point in continuous time.

I know, but the possibility of discrete time is interesting.
No different from playing Starcraft. A marine "moves" across the screen, but we know its teleporting from frame to frame. Who is to say that there arent discrete units of time, so small that we just can't tell?

But what animates the units moving in starcraft? The screen just redraws and the marine has a moved a few units only the x-axis. Does reality just redraw itself every unit of time? To me, that seems absurd.

Also, we need a good name for discrete units of time. I nominate dumbduckyions.

That's what makes the idea so interesting. What would be the mechanism that makes everything move forward? Even with continuous time, what's the mechanism that makes everything move forward? What "draws" the universe? Discrete time would also have some implications about the universe too, like there would be a limit on the precision of our measurement. Say we want to calculate a velocity, v = distance/time, but now there's a minimum time value that we can't pass, so we can't get more accurate at some point. Supposing something traveled sufficiently slow, we'd be able to see a 1 pixel jump in the universe (if we could measure that small).

Couldn't you just take a limit?

Also, how would different velocities work? Assuming space doesn't have the same discrete properties that this model of time does, then that means objects would just be teleporting different amounts in space as you compare one dumbduckyion to another. That would also mean that movement is not continuous, since there is no point in time where an object's position is equal to the points in space it passed. This has some implications beyond just teleporting. How do objects collide? If they don't actually cross the space they touch, they don't affect each other. A ball moving fast enough and a bat moving fast enough would just pass each other. This is like that part of quantum mechanics that says that I could fall through my chair, but it would not be based on random chances. It would be reliably reproducible. It just doesn't make any sense.

I think at this point all we can do is guess. As an agnostic, I think there's a one percent chance there's a Christian god, a one percent chance there's a Hindu god, a one percent chance there is no god, a one percent none of us actually exist, a one percent chance there's something else out there I don't know about (go on about all the different gods I know about etc.) because there is no proof of any of these things. There's no proof of any of your questions, so I'd say there's a 10% chance of all of your OP questions, then another 10% chance that none of exist, that burritos rule the world, that Oprah is the ultimate ruler of the universe.. etc.

Basically I just don't think it matters, although it is interesting to talk about.

@Madroc - if it is so interesting to talk about, why not contribute to the discussion?

@Vrael - interesting point about the discretion element of time. The way I envisaged it was that each 'moment' of time (as I referred to in my post) is so infinitely small, that it is beyond measure and even comprehension. I would like to give a comparison to get this idea of 'infinitely small' time fragments.. immeasurable, minuscule, so small we can't even prove they exist - yet we are all wrapped in time and we know for a fact that 'time' exists.

Then to look and say that 'time is ending every (second)' - but replace 'second' with the 'infinitely small, immeasurable time fragment' - is a concept that is easy to grasp. What has happened in the past is irreversible, untouchable, and whatever we do in the present will have absolutely no consequence or effect on the past.

Edit: So I noticed you replied anyway:

But then, as you (Vrael) mentioned, what causes time to go forward? I think I sort of touched on this in my post:

Since the Big Bang (X, Y, Z event) required the fourth dimension of Time for it to exist. The very existence of the universe is what perpetuates time and keeps it moving forward.

If in each 'second', the 'Present Time' is consigned to the 'Past', the universe cannot exist without there being a new 'second' of 'Present Time'.

Is this 'Present Time' a finite resource? Is it being sucked from a vast unimaginable well of 'Future Time'? Perhaps the movement of 'Future' into 'Present moment' into 'Past' has been different in the past? Maybe in the turbulent time after the Big Bang, Time itself operated differently.

Time is also a social characteristic, and has been since the dawn of man. We measure a year by the Gregorian Calendar, we measure our months in weeks and days. We measure our days in 24 hours. Who is to say that this method has always been 'accurate'? What if only recently has the 'Time' on Earth balanced out due to the Universe constantly stretching?

Anyways - every time I post I throw up more and more questions... So I'll leave it for now, and maybe edit my post for clarity and structure.

Its already been proven that Gregorian Calender is inaccurate.

Uh, no. The line is infinitely long, but that does not mean the start point is at negative infinity and the end point is at positive infinity. A line going from 50 to infinity is infinitely long, but it starts at 50.

If I ask for the range of negative integers from lowest to highest, what would the answer be? The lowest negative integer would be negative infinity, and the highest would be -1. In this instance, we have found an end point but no defined beginning point. Supposing we started at negative infinity, we would never reach -1, but it is still the end point.

This whole discussion reminds me of the dichotomy paradox. For those who would rather not Google it, it basically states this: To go from one point to another, you must first travel half the distance. But to travel that distance, you must first travel half of it. Repeating this pattern, you'll find that it requires an object to perform an infinite number of tasks to travel any distance, thus making movement impossible.

I think the start of time would have to be the first instance of some entity in realization of motion. The end of time will be when there is no more realization of motion. How time started in the first place is another question mucked with religion and theories, and there's nothing to say that time cannot be restarted once it stops, because we do not know how it started in the first place.