2 days

7/2/2011 8:57:41 PM

actually, time is a gift from the his Noodliness.

7/2/2011 11:46:41 PM

Quote :

"I disagree. Time is not tangible in the same sense that physical quantities are."

facepalm?

It's not that I have a problem of this Kantian view, but really people... I'm pretty darn sure that time is a physical quantity, and that many useful things are accomplished treating it as such. Now could the act of a "measure" of time be called into question because one doubts the existence of the past itself, well yes. Yes you could do that.

7/3/2011 12:13:51 AM

Quote :

"I'm pretty darn sure that time is a physical quantity, and that many useful things are accomplished treating it as such"

I agree that treating time as a physical quantity is useful, but I don't agree that it actually is a physical quantity.

How does one measure time?

7/3/2011 12:39:35 PM

WITH A FUCKING STOPWATCH

7/3/2011 1:12:49 PM

Do stopwatches measure trolls too?

7/3/2011 3:31:28 PM

I'm not trolling, you're fucking useless.

You argue about nothing with no knowledge behind you.

You might as well be asking "What does green smell like?"

pfff

7/3/2011 3:46:48 PM

Alright, genius.

How does a stopwatch measure time?

7/3/2011 3:53:28 PM

Again, I'm not playing this game.

Go read a fucking book.

7/3/2011 3:57:04 PM

answer 2 is

click

click

7/3/2011 4:01:45 PM

Yet you keep posting.

Are you sure you're not playing troll? Perhaps you're confused? Having an existential crisis?

7/3/2011 4:01:54 PM

This is absurd, you're not really interested... most people here are not, even the philosophical ones.

You want to learn about how the universe works, go read some physics or some chemistry

but you'll never really learn how to do any real sort of problems...

it's just silly...

How does TIME WORK?... you sound like a child

7/3/2011 4:08:14 PM

Quote :

"Again, I'm not playing this game."

It's hard to be interested with all your dick waving.

7/3/2011 4:10:02 PM

stop asking stupid fucking questions

...

or more importantly, stop asking questions that are WAY WAY WAY harder than your level of knowledge or expertise

you should be satisfied with

"you measure it with a fucking clock"

which you already knew

[Edited on July 3, 2011 at 4:15 PM. Reason : .]

7/3/2011 4:12:21 PM

ITT nastoute waves his dick around in an attempt to prove it's the biggest.

7/3/2011 4:37:58 PM

hell, if you really want to

"understand the nature of time"

there are little data points on the right hand side of the screen

maybe you can do something with those?

7/3/2011 4:44:16 PM

The measurement of time is the human abstraction but the passage of time is the property of the Universe.

Imagine again the Universe with no intelligent minds. Just asteroids, hurtling about. Two asteroids in particular are on a trajectory to collide. If at one point they are not touching and then they are. How can this be possible without the property of that Universe which we call 'time' in ours?

Existence itself is a temporal condition. If you admit that anything in the Universe (even the Universe itself) exists then it follows that time must exist.

7/3/2011 7:12:31 PM

Quote :

"I agree that treating time as a physical quantity is useful, but I don't agree that it actually is a physical quantity."

The valid point from established physics is that time is just as much a physical quantity as say... distance. The reality is that there are many other physical quantities that are non-trivial to deduce from our common perspective of the universe.

To be clear, time is only an objective quantity in limited cases. On greater scales, spacetime must be considered where only events can be defined with a point in a non-euclidean 4-d coordinate system. You can't fully separate time from space... although time is distinguishable to some degree in a quirky sense.

This 4D spacetime, however, is objectively defined and those coordinates represents a physical vector quantity. This is about the most objective of any physical quantities we have.

That doesn't, however, invalidate the philosophical points. The Kantian view isn't strongly affected by adding General Relativity, because well... it's philosophy.

7/3/2011 7:47:41 PM

i don't believe in gravity. there, i said it.

7/3/2011 8:34:44 PM

Photons do not experience time. How's that for philosophical.

7/4/2011 9:02:31 PM

that might have been the smartest fucking thing said in this thread

goodness gracious

7/4/2011 9:39:10 PM

Animal Science?

and just rolled in with the "How you like me now?" statement

7/5/2011 1:44:22 AM

green typically smells like apple or mint.

7/6/2011 7:29:30 AM

Last page somebody expressed shock that probability can be conceived of in a subjective way. Here's a good explanation of the viewpoint, as expounded by Lord Keynes:

Quote :

"The terms certain and probable describe the various degrees of rational belief about a proposition which different amounts of knowledge authorise us to entertain. All propositions are true or false; but the knowledge we have of them depends on our circumstances; and while it is often convenient to speak of propositions as certain or probable, this expresses strictly a relationship in which they stand to a corpus of knowledge, actual or hypothetical, and not a characteristic of the propositions in themselves. A proposition is capable at the same time of varying degrees of this relationship, depending upon the knowledge to which it is related, so that it is without significance to call a proposition probable unless we specify the knowledge to which we are relating it. To this extent, therefore, probability may be called subjective. But in the sense important to logic, probability is not subjective. It is not, that is to say, subject to human caprice. A proposition is not probable because we think it so. When once the facts are given which determine our knowledge, what is probable and improbable in these circumstances has been fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion. The Theory of Probability is logical, therefore, because it is concerned with the degree of belief which it is rational to entertain in given conditions, and not merely with the actual beliefs of particular individuals, which may or may not be rational."

7/7/2011 12:28:02 PM

sup, McDouche?

7/16/2011 5:34:16 AM

^^ Makes me think of quantum field theory.

QFT is an adjustment of quantum that expands the concept that we can't know anything about a particle to also encompass the fact that we can't know everything about the fields that act on a particle.

Adapted for English, I feel like this thinking would dictate that all propositions and definitions contained within them are imprecise just as the trueness or falseness of the proposition is also imprecise.

That's not what the quote says. I just came up with it.

7/16/2011 9:19:33 PM

Probabilities are never "imprecise" if you take the subjectivist line above, because they are defined to be the unique value that holds between a rational observer and a body of data, measuring rational uncertainty.

7/17/2011 4:28:48 PM

Quote :

"The measurement of time is the human abstraction but the passage of time is the property of the Universe."

Isn't the same true of distance?

7/17/2011 6:00:50 PM

7/17/2011 8:53:57 PM