Thread: Whats time?

I like the concept but ...

This gets a little complicated as it only accounts for local time and does not cover time in general ( if there is such a thing ). For example how would you address the topic of simultaneity using your model.

Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell

The best mental model I have been able to construct for time is that it is an expanding wave front of very short duration, whose velocity defines the speed of light. Nothing can go faster than light because doing so would outrun time. The future does not exist before the wave front arrives, and the past does not exist after the wave front has passed. The initial impetus for the time wave was probably the big bang. I don't see any reason there could not be multiple time waves, but also don't see any way of determining if our perceived present is the first such wave, or the 50,000th. Time could be ringing like a bell, and we would never know.

Originally Posted by tom

I like the concept but ...

This gets a little complicated as it only accounts for local time and does not cover time in general ( if there is such a thing ). For example how would you address the topic of simultaneity using your model.

Yes, I like the concept as well. As for your "simultaneity" question, Tom, wouldn't that be handled the same way as some physists say you can tell what an electron a million light years away is doing by looking at one locally.

I'm not terribly excited by the neutrino FTL experiments. If they are FTL, they are not much FTL. Space is never truly empty, and it seems reasonable to me that photons, being EM particles, would travel a bit slower in a vacuum than neutrinos, which are not EM. We may be looking at a slight redefinition of c as the maximum speed of propagation of energy in space, rather than the speed of propagation of light in a vacuum. Also, the supernova results indicate that, if the neutrinos arrived before the photons they didn't beat them by much. According to the results of the accelerator experiments, the neutrinos should have arrived weeks or months before the photons. Maybe they did, and the event was just not noticed, or maybe we are looking at some strange relativistic effect we don't understand yet. Astronomers, experimentalists and theoreticians all have work to do.