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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.
You're either a Philosophy student, or you just watched Donnie Darko for the first time, right?
Time is an artificial construct of the Human mind that allows us to mark our pitiful existence in an uncaring universe.
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Except ... medical studies show that 'Deja Vu' is really just brain glitches that are nothing more than thinking after the fact that you knew it was going to work that way. You're having a minor seizure, not predicting the future.
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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.
It seems like it is just on the tip of the tounge, but just out of reach. Has anyone been able to announce a reasonaby random event before it happened while experiencing a deja vu? Something like "Bob will walk in though that door now" or "Bob is going to spill his drink".
No, they can't because it's an illusion. Your brain gets into a tight sensing/remembering loop for a short time, so it seems like you're recalling stuff that just happened, but it's the other way around. You're not used to that, so it's confusing and easily misinterpreted.
There's no more reason to be embarrassed by this than being fooled by optical illusions (happening in your visual cortex, not your eye in many instances) - our brains aren't perfect arbiters of the physical world, they interpolate quite a bit, so occasionally they get tripped up. This imperfection lets us laugh at Penn & Teller - it's all good.
Besides, we already know that memories are chemically encoded, so the only way to have memories of the future is magically putting chemical patterns in your brain. And between 'magic' and 'brain fart' - well, apply Occam's Razor.
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Thermodynamics is one of two sets of phenomena that are irreversible. The other is rather obscure, but is related to the fact that "ordinary" matter seems to be so much more abundant in our universe than anti-matter.
All other phenomena in our universe are reversible in time, which raises an interesting question: are we unable to see the future because our brains work on thermodynamic operations?
Not only biologic brains, but digital computers also depend on non-reversible operations. A two-input AND gate has a "0" output in three different input conditions: "00", "01", and "10". Now imagine a computer that uses a reversible logic system that is reversible, would that computer have a time-symmetric operation?
"it's just something that comes to your mind and because of the noise ratio you only notice it later"
The human brain is very good at creating non-existant patterns in random noise. There is a classic phycological experiment (IIRC by Skinner), showing that pigeons do exactly same thing (ie: engage in superstisious behaviour).
In the experiment a feeder was set up so that it would drop a pellet of food randomly with a mean time between pellet drops of a few minutes. The feeder was placed in the pigeon cage for an hour or two at normal feeding times.
The hungry pigeon would just happen to make some random movement just before the pellet happened to drop. It then mentally connected that movement with food and would repeat it a few times in the hope another pellet would appear.
Occasionally it would make a different movement just before the pellet appaeared. It would then mentally connect this new movement with food and join the two movements together in the hope of getting more food. After a while the pigeon(s) had all created their own unique an complex dance that they would start endlessly performing whenever the dispenser was introduced to their cage.
The really interesting part is that the time it took to perform a fully developed pigeon dance was always equal to the mean time between random pellet drops, meaning the pidgeon was virtually garenteed to recieve the reward after one or two performances of it's dance. Connecting random dreams to future events after the fact is just one of the many human forms of the pigeon dance.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.