How is time organized?

whaaa?

ask the Mayans, they made it all up

based around the seasons and the sun is it not?

i think we should eliminate tuesdays and have six 28 hour days in a week.  we could be so much more productive. monday, wednesday, thursday, etc..

We could easily add an hour or two onto each day and eventually no one would ever notice.  The whole system could be rewritten to contain 25 hours instead of 24, however there would need to be some changes but it's possible.  The only reason for this 24 system is beyond me, people were way too smart too early in history of mankind. 

you cannot organize time.

wtf would jack bauer do with that extra hour?

your perception of the passing of time is relative to the speed of your own thought processing. If you could think 60 times faster than normal, then a second would feel like a minute. And you could say that your only thinking that time is slowing down, but in reality time moves as fast or as slow as it wants. If you were cryogenically frozen for 1000 years and then woken up, you would think you had only slept for 1 night

hah no you couldnt cuz then the sunrise would be totally off whack. if you added an extra hour as in the hour we know it as, the sun would start rising in a totall different hour every day. it would be so fucked up and our bodies wouldnt function correctly. Im pretty sure our measurement of time these days is an eclectic derivative of many systems and is based on the suns rotation and orbit around the sun.

i remember reading one of hawkings books, where he was talking about symmetry and lack thereof in different cases. also, he discusses why it is that we know about events in the past and not in the future, not the other way around. im not good enough to explain it but il try to find the extract, real interesting to think about, especially aided by drugs

If you could find that extract, that would be bomb

time is organized by the environment around us and how the planets rotate and revolve. 1 year (365 1/4 days) is equivalent to 1rotation around the sun.  a day is one rotation of the earth. and the reason we use  60 minutes in an hour/60sec in a minute is because it is one of the most divisible numbers. its all a matter of numbers and motion of the planets.

:O

So ive read these books and they really throw off your idea of time.

Einstein's dreams- Alan Lightman
Kindred-  Octavia E Butler
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Einstein's dreams definitely is the most thought provoking novel out of the above listed and its basically a bunch of time theories thrown together that really fucks with your head if you think too much into it.  The other two are just novels that involve traveling through space/time.  I really recommend Einsteins dreams if you're looking for a thought provoking read and the others if you're just simply looking for entertainment

a bit off topic, but the reason we have 360 degrees in a circle is that its meant to represent one days movement around the sun, but 365.25 is an awkward number to work with so they adjusted it to the nearest easily divisible number, 360.

24 hours (according to my maths teacher) is a combination of (on average) 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. this was an attempt to continue the order of 12 months.

but all of this is how humans have organised time, not how the universe/its creator/physics has organised time which imo is a far more interesting topic. ryno, il have a look tonight for that book and try to paraphrase some of it

Read the Critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant.

I'm pretty sure it was actually the Babylonians that came up with our basic time increments.

Either way, they were created by people mo smatah than me.

he would time it perfectly so that he would have one more hour of terrorist ass kicking.

you win! she rotates 15 degrees every hour. 15/360=24

I think the roman math dudes figured that 360 was a good number to use because you can divide it by like, anything... so yeah it works well.

the myans did it differently i think. they were obsessed with time keeping and organized their calendar to account for that 360.25 degree rotation so it was spot on. they were also maping out the cosmos like mad and their calendar is supposed to be able to predict solar eclipses 2000 years in advance.

Then they predict the earth and the sun lining up with a giant black hole in the middle of the galaxy on december 21st 2012, and they decided to stop the calendar there. And now our scientists say that they've found that black hole with some kind of crazy telescope or voodoo or something. So we're all fucked. thanks guys...

This information is mostly taken from Stephen Hawking's lecture, 'The Direction of Time', and some other scattered online sources. It's a bit too long to write out in full, but I'll do my best to simplify it.


"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there - but why is the past so different from the future? Why do we remember the past, but not the future?" - L.P. Hartley

Physics describes the universe as being T Symmetric, i.e. all laws are time symmetric. Despite this, we see an obvious difference between the past and the future. Hawking describes the different ways in which the direction of time flows, which he calls  'time arrows'.. There are four different time arrows, each of which dictates the flow of time in its own way:

- The thermodynamic arrow of time is based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics - put simply, the overall disorder (entropy) of the universe is always increasing with time. From this, we can say that time is pointing in the direction in which disorder is increasing.

- The causal arrow of time describes that time is pointing in the direction in which cause precedes effect. This is an effect of the thermodynamic arrow.

- The psychological arrow of time describes the past as that which we remember, and the future is that which we don't. This arrow describes time as pointing in the direction opposite to that which we remember. This can be reduced to the thermodynamic arrow because the energy used to embed memory increases the amount of disorder in the universe.

-The cosmological arrow of time is that time is pointing in the direction in which the universe is expanding and not contracting.

There are more arrows (radiative, quantum etc.) but I'm trying to keep this short and they are all consequences of the thermodynamic arrow. It can be shown that the thermodynamic, causal, and psychological arrows always point in the same direction. Hawking discusses if these will all reverse if the cosmological arrow reverses (i.e. when the universe starts contracting again), but research by Raymond Laflamme has shown that if the universe contracts, it need not be time symmetric.

If this is the case, all four arrows will always be pointing in the same directioin ('forwards' as we percieve it') in relation to the universe.





I'm not sure if this makes sense to you guys, I've tried to summarise it but it's hard to write and explain as skilfully as Hawking. Let me know if you need anything clarified.

 http://www.albionmonitor.com/0606a/aymara.html

This is an article about a culture which sees time in a different way to most people.

"Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans -- a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind -- the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind."

put some shit under your tounge and all of the sudden.... "time is just a number!" haha

because we cant see or even prove that seeing makes something real, there is no real proof that the concept of time was ever invented, it was simply around when everyone else here showed up on earth.

who knows if time was going on before or after each of our existence, as there is no conceivable way to tell.

exactly. so have fun while you can!

Although he didn't believe it himself at the time, Einstein's equations put an end to the rotating and/or static universe. Even before his work, Newton's equations, when analyzed properly, could never form a stable and static universe. Newton and even Einstein were just so convinced that the universe was static that they ignored all the opposing evidence. Einstein even believed this so thoroughly that he 'ruined' his equations by adding the cosmological constant. He was wrong.