r H Y nolite
d is for Design.Tuesday, July 29, 2003
It's been a whole month since my last entry, well my dad's just gone to bed so i figure i can stay here a tad longer to type something decent in my blog.
well i left off saying that i'd come back with a discussion of the absolutism of time, so here it is. don't fall asleep reading it!
hey! wake up!
...
ANYWAY, the whole idea of the absolutism of time can be summarised into a single question: is time absolute?
well, yeah, some of you are prolly going ' yar duh! ' right now, but that's the best way i could put the whole idea into a single sentence.
well, basically the question asks a question i always ask myself: is my one second the same 'time interval' as everybody else's? like, maybe my one second's worth of time goes real fast while other people's second goes really slowly, so my single second could somehow fit into their 3 second's worth of time? sure there's this funny thing called the watch, but how do we interpret and experience the second, the minute, the hour, the day as individual human beings? sometimes i really wonder if some of my friends live life in 's-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n'? well, slow mo in my perspective, because they would never have thought that they've been living in slow mo if they'd been like that their whole lives eh?
so fundamentally the whole idea is about the unique human experience of life and time itself. funny how time came about too eh? maybe there is no past or future? maybe our world was just a continuous flowing of the present. ever thought of that? so if that was the case it would never be possible to travel through time: because there IS no such thing is time!
it's surprising to see how time had evolved from a wholly human construct into something everybody takes for granted. well, almost everybody except maybe your teachers and parents ( ' time is precious! you'd better treasure it! ' ). 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes and hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year, 10 years a decade... well you get the drift. how did all these number come about? sure somebody would be thinking ' well the earth revolves around the sun once a year! of course that would be a good benchmark for time! ' okay, so the year is taken as a form of reference point. right? then how do we explain 24 hours a day? why can't it be 25 hours a day? or maybe even just 3 hours a day? is that possible? how do we know, at the very very start of each day, the references for ' the hour '? the problem just goes on and on, for 60 seconds a minute and 60 minutes an hour... i hope you get what i mean at this point in time, because the later discussions are only to get more complicated, i think! haha.. hey! wake up!
but this isn't what i mean by the absolutism of time, the previous paragraph is just to remind you that time is not a 'natural' thing. humans made it up to easier organise their increasingly complicated lives.
here's the real deal on the absolutism of time:
there was once an experiment done whereby two atomic clocks ( in case you don't know what it is: an atomic clock is a VERY VERY accurate measure for time using the vibrational movements of the atom to measure time, well, for a certain range of accurate that is... ) were synchronised and one was sent up on a plane into the air and flown around the world at relatively high speeds while the other clock was settled soundly on earth. at the end of the experiment, the two clocks were brought together again and guess what? the atomic clock that went around the world showed a time reading that was a few seconds before the other clock which was grounded. conclusion: time went by slower on the plane than on land!
so after the experiment, scientists hypothesized that if another experiment was done where one half of a pair of twins was put into a spaceship and sent off travelling into space at much greater speeds compared to the plane the clock was in, in 80 years when the spaceship returns the spaceman twin would look significantly younger than that of his 80-year-old twin brother!
so here is the problem:
suppose the spaceman twin was 50 years of age when he returns to earth from his 80 year journey in space, has he really experienced 50 years of life? or has he experienced 80 years? what about the twin who was grounded, safely on earth? ' obviously ' he has experienced 80 years of life, as shown on his wrinkled face, some would say, but has he really? how do you define the phrase ' 80 years of life ' ?
when i first learned of this hypothesis, i was left deeply traumatised because i couldn't find an answer for it. and i probably still don't right now, but now i have developed my own way of thinking about such questions, which i shall not disclose here because it would probably take another century to convince some of you to look at my perspective. it's just pretty provocative somehow, but if you really want to know, you could always ask me, i'd be more than happy to go into discussions about such mysteries...
well i left off saying that i'd come back with a discussion of the absolutism of time, so here it is. don't fall asleep reading it!
hey! wake up!
...
ANYWAY, the whole idea of the absolutism of time can be summarised into a single question: is time absolute?
well, yeah, some of you are prolly going ' yar duh! ' right now, but that's the best way i could put the whole idea into a single sentence.
well, basically the question asks a question i always ask myself: is my one second the same 'time interval' as everybody else's? like, maybe my one second's worth of time goes real fast while other people's second goes really slowly, so my single second could somehow fit into their 3 second's worth of time? sure there's this funny thing called the watch, but how do we interpret and experience the second, the minute, the hour, the day as individual human beings? sometimes i really wonder if some of my friends live life in 's-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n'? well, slow mo in my perspective, because they would never have thought that they've been living in slow mo if they'd been like that their whole lives eh?
so fundamentally the whole idea is about the unique human experience of life and time itself. funny how time came about too eh? maybe there is no past or future? maybe our world was just a continuous flowing of the present. ever thought of that? so if that was the case it would never be possible to travel through time: because there IS no such thing is time!
it's surprising to see how time had evolved from a wholly human construct into something everybody takes for granted. well, almost everybody except maybe your teachers and parents ( ' time is precious! you'd better treasure it! ' ). 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes and hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year, 10 years a decade... well you get the drift. how did all these number come about? sure somebody would be thinking ' well the earth revolves around the sun once a year! of course that would be a good benchmark for time! ' okay, so the year is taken as a form of reference point. right? then how do we explain 24 hours a day? why can't it be 25 hours a day? or maybe even just 3 hours a day? is that possible? how do we know, at the very very start of each day, the references for ' the hour '? the problem just goes on and on, for 60 seconds a minute and 60 minutes an hour... i hope you get what i mean at this point in time, because the later discussions are only to get more complicated, i think! haha.. hey! wake up!
but this isn't what i mean by the absolutism of time, the previous paragraph is just to remind you that time is not a 'natural' thing. humans made it up to easier organise their increasingly complicated lives.
here's the real deal on the absolutism of time:
there was once an experiment done whereby two atomic clocks ( in case you don't know what it is: an atomic clock is a VERY VERY accurate measure for time using the vibrational movements of the atom to measure time, well, for a certain range of accurate that is... ) were synchronised and one was sent up on a plane into the air and flown around the world at relatively high speeds while the other clock was settled soundly on earth. at the end of the experiment, the two clocks were brought together again and guess what? the atomic clock that went around the world showed a time reading that was a few seconds before the other clock which was grounded. conclusion: time went by slower on the plane than on land!
so after the experiment, scientists hypothesized that if another experiment was done where one half of a pair of twins was put into a spaceship and sent off travelling into space at much greater speeds compared to the plane the clock was in, in 80 years when the spaceship returns the spaceman twin would look significantly younger than that of his 80-year-old twin brother!
so here is the problem:
suppose the spaceman twin was 50 years of age when he returns to earth from his 80 year journey in space, has he really experienced 50 years of life? or has he experienced 80 years? what about the twin who was grounded, safely on earth? ' obviously ' he has experienced 80 years of life, as shown on his wrinkled face, some would say, but has he really? how do you define the phrase ' 80 years of life ' ?
when i first learned of this hypothesis, i was left deeply traumatised because i couldn't find an answer for it. and i probably still don't right now, but now i have developed my own way of thinking about such questions, which i shall not disclose here because it would probably take another century to convince some of you to look at my perspective. it's just pretty provocative somehow, but if you really want to know, you could always ask me, i'd be more than happy to go into discussions about such mysteries...
