It is not ‘daylight-savings” Time.
It is Daylight Saving Time.

Yeah, but Daylight Savings Time is sooooo much easier to say.

Is there such a thing as an objective perspective, Tegemark’s bird’s eye view? Or is that an oxymoron? The problem with defining space as three dimensional is that these serve as coordinates for the center point. While we as individuals effectively function as points in space(and time), they are not the same point. Although much of politics and religion revolves around providing such a communal point, sects based on different points emerge, resulting in large scale conflict. You might say the Arabs and the Israelis use different frames of reference to define the same space (and time).

I’m certainly not playing down how distance regulates energy transfer. If the blast of a super nova from 1000 years ago is set to destroy us, it will do so because the energy blasted in our direction reaches us and is no longer contained in the original star. As I’ve argued, there is only energy, spread across space. Time, like temperature, is a measure of the motion of this activity. This isn’t presentism, because as a measure of motion it would be meaningless to specify that all this activity exists at the same instant in time. We can model time as a tensor, just as we measure temperature as a scalar, but there is no fundamental existance of this dimension, any more then there is a fundamental temperature scale. The only absolute for both would be the complete absence of motion. Time may seem fundamental from our perspective, but so is temperature. Consider the basis of Big Bang theory, redshift and cosmic background radiation, are both measures of temperature, ie. reduced levels of energy from what the scale would otherwise be. We cannot travel back in time to see what happened, we can only measure current energy levels.

Time is “linear” as space is “flat”. We take a 4D frame of reference and define everything around that frame of reference. So long as other folks share a similar frame of reference, we come to the same (or similar) conclusions about reality.

However we are trying to establish the nature of cosmological reality, and the idea that one event “replaces another” doesn’t match the overall situation.
Rather, one event replaces the other as WE observe time and space at our coordinates.

Be careful not to down play the observation with distance factor I refer to- it is significant. We exist- the universe we exist in, exists because of that factor. It is not a matter of “diminishing photons”, (though there are interesting clues in that phenomenon) rather separation in what we observe as space and time. There may be a supernova out there 1,000 light years away which has already occurred, yet we have not yet been destroyed by it….

I realize it is normal to model time as linear. That’s what history is. Still, two points in time don’t co-exist the way two points in space can. The light we see was radiated ten years ago and crossed an enormous amount of space. Because energy is conserved, it can’t physically exist in previous states.

My point about time is that it is specifically a consequence of motion. It would be equally meaningless to say that everything exists at the point of the present, because, according to the uncertainty principle, position and momentum are not compatible, measurement wise. So if time is a function of momentum, it would cease to exist at a point. Just as temperature ceases to exist at the absolute, motionless state.
I think the reason we process it as a point is because our brains must process information as frames, otherwise it would all blur together.

The further question though, is space. We define it according to motion of energy and mass. but does motion create it, like time and temperature? Say there was no motion. Would energy/mass exist? A non-flucuating vacuum? There would be no geometry, no math, no physics, no equations. Just void…. Is space the void? The non-being to the being of mass/energy? As zero is to one? I think time is a description of motion, but I’m not so sure about space.
Consider one of my earlier points; That as the universe expands, according to redshift, the speed of light remains stable. This would make the expanding universe an increasing volume of stable space, rather then expanding space. Not that the speed of light couldn’t vary, but we wouldn’t have the yardstick to detect it. Whole other argument there though.
So space is the real mystery to me. Getting our hands around that would be like understanding death, but we’d probably just lose a few fingers trying. Getting out past the tattered edges of reality and you just come back tattered, if at all. The whole being and non-being thing.

Or a wireless connection, or a Blackberry, or an iPhone, or…

Old is the new new.

Accurate-to-the-second time and date only work well locally, so time zones were invented to standardize. Prior to railroads, each community kept local solar time, which was reasonably accurate but dependent on longitude and only pertinent locally.

For example: A train might leave Chicago at 1pm local Chicago time, and travel east for 1 hour at 96mph. It would arrive at a South Bend at 2pm Chicago time, but that would be somewhat later, local South Bend time, say 2:10. Today, you reset your watch when you cross time zones. Without time zones, you would reset it some weird amount every time you traveled east or west. You would only know what the new local time was by asking – or being a scientist with a sextant.

With time zones the times are predictable, even if there is the element of arbitrary fiat.
If South Bend were EST and Chicago CST, the train would leave Chicago at 1pm CST and arrive in South Bend (1 hour later) at 3pm EST. If both were in the same time zone, it would arrive (1 hour later) at 2pm. Establishing time zones made life much easier for transportation and communication.

I think everybody is thinking about the possible implications of CPT symmetry insofar as the macroscopic universe is concerned. I also think that the fact that time even seems to have a different quality than the other spatial dimensions implies that there is something unique about it…in spite of the fact that treating time as space-like in relativity works just fine.

Remember, we can find the “Big Bang” at a certain place in scale…and locate the “Big Crunch” too…to say nothing of the fact that every second of a stars existence from beginning to end could be observed from some coordinates elsewhere in the cosmos. To me all this implies that time really is not absolute (as Einstein obviously asserted) but that time “happens” when we take a frame of reference and electromagnetically observe the universe of stored information in a certain very specific way.

However, we observe and measure time (along with space) and therefore we ARE justified in assuming that the universe is not, nor can be completely static. However we are also justified in concluding that time does not exist cosmologically as we humans individually or collectively measure it. Mass and energy density presence in the universe defines both time and space, not the other way around.

I don’t think we can justifiably assume that each event is “replaced by the next”, to use your words, when we can look at a planet orbiting a star 10 light years away, and see events which transpired 10 years ago as if they were happening today. The only conclusion we CAN draw is that everything which exists and “happens” in the universe has an eternal place, or set of coordinates.

I think you may be rushing to conclusions about time which are not justified by field evidence. This universe of ours is really a counterintuitive place…things are, to use the poets words, “not as they seem”.

Best Wishes…Sam

Anyone have a scheme based on powers of 10 and seconds? Kiloseconds are fun for intervals, but as an absolute system the numbers get too big, even setting aside the lack of reference to noon and dusk. The best “metric” scheme I’ve seen is the more recent year.day-of-year.milliday where milliday is the . That unnecessarily moves the meridian though.

And it must be the DST, and not the teens’ social lives and avoidance of sensible bed times, that is responsible.

Anyone opposed to DST is welcome to come babysit for us: our child wakes up at first light, which is 5:30 in the middle of summer, but would be 4:30 without DST.