Concepts of time

So... what do y'all believe, is time linear, cyclical, cuboid, or what?!

I recently heard someone on the news mention how a new satellite telescope would use x-rays to see into the history of our universe; my immediate reaction was 'and these guys are getting paid for this?!'... it's like so-called scientists claiming 'time-travel' might be possible - such nonsense!

Honestly, we all accept that reason would suggest the universe to be infinite and by extension so would be time - at least retrospectively! So, how and to what purpose would we ever see anything of any use to us now by 'looking into the past'?!

Whatever you believe - 'big-bang' or 'creation', surely that is just a curtain or cut-off and there will always be a 'and before that' before anything and everything?

Time - an illusory human construct that we can use to help us function in a Universe we barely understand.

That's my take, but then time has never meant much to me.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
- Douglas Adams

Sir, every time you look at the stars you are looking into the past. We don't travel to the past; it travels to us. The x-rays come from longer and longer ago (farther and farther away). Pretty cool to me!

Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even the past."

And what EoC said.


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Maybe i am missing out, but i have spent very little time in my life looking at stars.

Difficult if you live anywhere near a big city. In my youth I recall going into the heart of Dartmoor National Park, finding a quiet open piece ground and just lying down looking up. Not concentrating on anything specific, just letting the eyes rest on the scene. It can be incredibly peaceful. Daytime blue skies work the same way, but quiet is essential to this IMO.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SIR

Maybe i am missing out, but i have spent very little time in my life looking at stars.

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I live in a dark sky zone so I get a constant reminder of how very big it is out there and how very little my mind is in comparison.

I was always enamored with the perspective in Slaughterhouse Five. You know, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It just made sense to me that there is a perspective, if only God's, that is out of time looking in at the 4-dimensional tapestry of history (past, present, and future) as a whole thing while, Billy's notwithstanding, our consciousness is somehow "stuck" on a slow-moving, one-direction track that we think of as the "present". It is somewhat less pleasant to think of it as an immutable thing, as it was in the book. The point is not to overindulge on the details of the idea, rather to consider the possibility of perceiving time as a physical dimension.

I have heard, but am unable to qualify, that some (maybe all) Native Indian groups have a circular view of time that includes neither a past nor a future, just an eternal now. I like that.

"Yes, of course, who has time? Who has time? But then if we do not ever take time, how can we ever have time?" Merv