Slashdot Mirror
What Is Time? One Researcher Shares His Exploration
Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."
About half past ten, give or take a couple of minutes.
FORD: No, No listen. Just imagine that you’ve got this ebony bath, right? And it’s conical.
ARTHUR: Conical? What kind of bath is -
FORD: No, no, shh, shhh, it’s, it’s, it’s conical okay? So what you do, you fill it with fine white sand right? Or sugar, or anything like that. And when it’s full, you pull the plug out and it all just twirls down out of the plug hole but the thing is
ARTHUR: Why?
FORD: No, the clever thing is that you film it happening. You get a movie camera from somewhere and actually film it. But then you thread the film in the projector backwards.
ARTHUR: Backwards?
FORD: Yeah, neat you see. So what happens is you sit and you watch it and then everything appears to swirl upwards, out of the plug hole and fill the bath amazing.
ARTHUR: And that’s how the universe began?
FORD: No. But it’s a marvellous way to relax.
TRILLIAN: Funny man.
FORD: Well it broke the ice didn’t it?
You're either a Philosophy student, or you just watched Donnie Darko for the first time, right?
Hello. I am a time traveler. Be not afraid. I come from the past and I travel into the future at a rate of one second per second.
actually, its fowl
automate it with a shell script
rewriting history since 2109
it's just one of his yolks, although he might have poached it.
rewriting history since 2109
Time is what you are wasting right now.
could ever experience anything truly random?
Halt! As Captain of the Internets, I cannot stand to hear you lies anymore! No randomness? Blasphemy! Lunacy! Have you ever been to Wikipedia? The dark corners of the Internet, such as 4chan? Fark? IRC? Had you been there, you would have seen the reality of randomness! Now repent your crimes before I am forced to put you into the Total Perspective Vortex with a half naked anime character, a motivational poster, and a Wiki article on the nature of the Etruscan language, which you got to by starting on the page on pastrie!
SSC
Good Lord! You killed him with your mind.
I knew you were going to say that
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
it's just like the help you get at microsoft's website. the answer will be flawlessly worded and technically correct, but you're still no closer to solving your problem
Time is something I measure in paychecks.
I saw that coming.