Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
I have always found that 'time' is a difficult concept, and yesterday I saw an interesting program about it that kind of made it more complicated ;-)

So what is time? Movements on a watch's face? If you take the watch away, is there not time? Well, there are the seasons, due to the earth's travel around the sun. So, if you have no earth and no sun, is there no time???
Yes, there is. People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.
They say time moves foreward, never backwards, but no one knows why..The example was a gletcher from which ice broke off to land in the sea. It never hops back into the gletcher again - why not? According to Brian Cox, physicist, nothing in the natural laws prevent it.
Well, he's stretching the truth there. A massive reversal of entropy like that, by pure chance, is theoretically possible, but you run out of zeroes to say how improbable it is. On average, the arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing entropy.

But to me a much more interesting point is that, theoretically, there is no arrow of time. Physicists model events by space-time diagrams which don't have any points on them marked "Past" "Present" and "Future": those concepts are irrelevant. You cannot find anything in science to tell you why "now" is different from "then," it is something that only happens in our heads. Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings. One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...
He talked about how a lot of stuff was brought into motion by the big bang (no one knows how that happended or why, or from what) and that those reactions run along still. Stars collaps and explode. He said the star 'died'. He talked that way about many things, and I do not quite understand, but then I do not understand 'death' either. It is said to mean the end of whatever died, finished, gone. But in reality it always seems to mean change.
When my children were little, when I had to explain to them that something was broken or worn out beyond repair, I would tell them it was dead. I felt that besides giving them a useful conceptual tool for knowing when to give up on things, it would prepare them for the time when they had to encounter a living thing's death. They would already understand that sometimes things are finished and can't be brought back, however we may want them.

The star stops being a star, ok so far, but it does not vanish, what is was does not disappear, rather it is spread over a big area. When we die, we are also spread around. Even before we are spread around - by DNA if we have off spring they have bits of us in them, as we have bits of others in us in a long chain backwards. And when we die, what we are made of does not vanish as such, the combination we were does, but our stuff goes into other stuff. Nothing vanishes, as such. It changes.

That is why the only way I can understand 'death' is as 'change'.
That works for me.

This guy talked about the end of the universe, which I think must be an old theory. Leo9 says the 'heat death' theory dates before the discovery of the the black holes, and I would be grateful if you would say something about that Leo9, please? It does not compute that 'something' becomes 'nothing'. That matter disappear, or energy disappear.
OK, the old idea of the "heat death of the universe" was a simple extrapolation of thermodynamics. Entropy must always increase (on average), therefore there must come a time when general entropy is so high - energy and matter are so evened out and mixed up - that there are no concentrations of energy or matter left to make anything happen, and the universe will settle into a permanent flat calm.

This was always philosophically awkward, because it left cosmology with a beginning but no end, and people have been thinking up ways round it ever since. One such theory notes that black holes break the rules: however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy. So it's been suggested that, since the flow of matter into black holes is irreversible, eventually they must mop up all the mass in the universe, then draw themselves together, till everything there is is packed into one vast black hole... which might be the seed of a new universe?


Right. So, does anyone understand what 'time' is, and can tell me more?
"Time is what stops everything from happening at once."

Does anyone understand what 'death' is, and can tell me more?
A boy who worked for a Zen master dropped the master's favourite cup. When the master returned that evening the boy said "Master, why is there death?"

"People die when it is time," said the master. "It is meant to be."

The boy brought the pieces of china from behind his back and said "Master, it was time for your cup to die."
Surely there is more to us that our bodies - where does it go? Join the rest of energy, as our stuff joins other stuff?
Mind is not just energy. Like a candle flame or this document on the computer, it is energy in an orderly self-maintaining pattern, and when the pattern breaks down (the mind dies, the candle goes out, the computer closes down or crashes,) the energy is conserved but the order is gone.

In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.

And what about the universe? What started it, and from what? Where will it go?
{levitates gently to the ceiling chanting OM} It is a cosmic mystery, my child...