Quote:
Originally posted by FleaCircus
But time is more than just a ruler. It is actually a physical dimension. By physical, I suppose I mean existential, in that it exists independently of any particular perception of it. But it's not a spatial dimension, in the way we think of left-right or up-down.
That, and time really isn't constant. The faster you go, the more time slows down. Think about this:
Two twins synchronize their super-accurate watches. One kicks back here on earth, drinking margaritas and watching T.V. The other climbs into a spacecraft and zips around the galaxy for what he thinks is a year. The only catch: he does it at close to the speed of light.
He gets back when his watch says he's been gone a year. But when he sees his twin, his twin's watch says he's been gone fifty years. And yet both of them are correct.
The closer you get to the speed of light, the greater the differential. The further you are from the speed of light, the lesser the differential. But what this does mean is that time passes more slowly for someone on top of Mount Everest (faster velocity due to the rotation of the earth) than it does for someone at sea level.
It's just a negligible difference, so no one notices. Read the relativity section of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" for more.
I know I gave a physics answer in a philosophy forum, but there you go.
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Forgive my ignorance, but I could never quite grasp this concept and perhaps someone here can explain it to me better than a textbook. If time is only just a marker created by humans to map changing events, how can this rate at which time occurs change with the spped at which an object is moving? Has any one ever done an experiment were two identical, extrememly accurate watches were created and placed a two spots on the Earth, one at sea level and one on the top of Mt. Everest, and time at the tip of Mt. Everest was proven to "move" more slowly? Or is this difference in time just too small to measure with modern technology? It seems like spatially, a person standing on Mt. Everest has travelled a greater distance (due to the Earth's rotation) in a the same amount of time as a person standing at sea level, but the point is, the same increment of time has passed.