• mods_mum
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    3 months ago

    Just a nitpick from a cosmology aficionado. According to many physicists time doesn’t really exist, it’s just an emergent property of heat and laws of thermodynamics. Imagine a clock, its hands moving because there is energy stored in the clock’s mechanisms. Now, if you suddenly drop temperature to absolute zero then atoms in this clock and everywhere around it stop “vibrating” and everything just stops. You will be unable to perceive the flow of time because the system you find yourself in is completely static, there’s no change occuring in it. This doesn’t apply to relativity, if you’re interested so it looks like we are yet to discover the nature of time.

    • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      That was one of the reasons I put “time” in quotes, actually. However, I had to lean into determinism fairly hard to make a “point” about how chaos is not really chaotic and that humans haven’t created any disasters because the disasters “have already happened”. (Don’t read into that. My jumble of logical fallacies was intended to sound more like an acid trip.)

      Time is a funny thing though. We perceive and experience time, but time relative to the rest of the universe is basically irrelevant. Que my rant about how our measurement systems need to have better scaling, but I’ll save that topic for the next reading from the Book of Ian.