20150708

Linear time and circular motion



Blog 20150708

Another question by henk:

“Why is time linearized although clocks using circular motion are used to construct a linear time? If one says that now waves are used I remark that a wave can be visualized easily by circular motion. Anyhow, it makes calculations easier and it can be used to construct a fourth dimension which makes things rather complicated. So, my question remains.”

[GB: henk, again, time is motion. Paths taken by microcosms in motion can have an infinite number of geometric shapes in relation to other microcosms. Linear motion (or linear time) is only an idealization. In his First Law of Motion, Newton imagined a body traveling through absolute space in a straight line. In actuality, the rotation and revolution of Earth actually makes that impossible. Any point on Earth follows a nearly circular path. In spite of this, when we measure the distance between two microcosms on Earth, we find the straight-line distance to be more or less constant relative to each other. However, if the distance is great, we need to take the curvature of Earth into account.

None of this makes any difference in understanding time. The velocity of a race car is the same whether it is traveling around a race track or traveling in a straight line. One hundred kilometers per hour is the same in either case. The “hour,” of course, is yet another measurement, which we have established by convention, even though Earth is not a very good time keeper—there are much better ones, cesium-133, for instance. All clocks, like all motions in the infinite universe, are relative to each other.   

I don’t know what you mean by saying that wave motion makes understanding time any easier or that it makes calculations easier or that it leads to a fourth dimension. Things have only three dimensions, xyz, and time is not a thing. Time is motion, and does not exist—it occurs. Of course, in mathematics you can imagine as many “dimensions” as you wish. Nature, however, has only three.

Again, remember that universal time is the motion of all things in the universe with respect to all other things. None of those motions in the infinite universe  is reversible, per the Seventh Assumption of Science, irreversibility (All processes are irreversible). That is why the “arrow of time” only goes one way. None of those infinite microcosms can ever return to the spacetime position it had before because its relationship to all the other microcosms keeps changing. As mentioned last week, all microcosms must be in continual motion in order to exist.]