Replies to Comments

Time in Philosophy and Physics

My apologies for the delayed response. My first effort was not posted.

Philosophies connecting time with change are numerous. Consider our use of the Earth's rotation to regulate our clocks. Julian Barbour's winning essay for the The Foundational Questions Institute is an appropriate reference for our discussion of time as movement as it is against his views that I am arguing.

General Relativity

Einstein Proposed that because acceleration compresses space/time, observers that have experience different accelerations (inertial reference frames) will experience different intervals. He reasoned that since time (Path through Space/time) will be different for each observer there can be no "real" time. An observer that has accelerated will move into the future of one that has not. On a microscope scale we are all moving at different velocities. Are we disconnected in time? The astronaut in orbit experiences faster time as a result of his lesser gravitational acceleration. Are we short cutting into his future? Another conundrum; could there be thousands of you's communicating with thousands of me's all at thousands of different points along the unmoving time continuum?

My position is that general relativity does not require discontinuity of Space/time. Along any time-line there are an infinite number of points that can be exactly mapped to the infinite number of points on a different space/time track. Your GPS unit easily correlates the effects of general relativity to give each location a position in space and time. There are Lorentz transformations that can unite all our time-lines into a connected continuum. The result is that time and the passing of time is a shared reality.