Time between years

**TevashSzat** · 01-11-2009, 19:39

Originally Posted by edyzmedieval

A quick question, isn't there an incredibly small point in time where we have two years connected? I am reffering to the time when 23:59 31st of December 2008 (or any other year) becomes 00:00 1st of January 2009 (or any other year) and the change of years happens at the 60th second of the last minute.

Is there a moment of time when both years are in the same "frame", to say it like that?

Well, I suppose that there is always an exact point in time when the Earth reaches exactly the point it was at before.

That point, however, would be infinitesimally small, which means for general purposes there are no connections between years

**Ramses II CP** · 01-12-2009, 20:12

Don't make the mistake of confusing the artificial, purely human, breakdown of time into seconds into something intrinsic or interesting about the universe. We segment time into seconds for our ease of understanding, not because that segmentation actually reveals anything important about reality.

In other words, if you want years to be connected then you can see them that way, and if you want them not to be connected you can see them that way as well and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Pink unicorns on the head of a pin and all that nonsense.

**Philippus Flavius Homovallumus** · 01-17-2009, 04:44

Mmmm, time is a dimention, not a clock. It isn't actually divisable. Either there are no years, seconds are absolute, or you divide time into infinitely smaller units.

Each way it can only be one year at a time.

**Juvenal** · 02-09-2009, 18:11

I don't think anyone actually knows what Time is.

It can be imagined as continuous, as in Zeno's Paradoxes, but it is actually measured discretely. So to answer the OP, there isn't any point in time that is simultaneously in two years.

Time is continuous in Relativity, but it isn't absolute - every observer has their own personal time that appears to progress at a different rate to that of other observers with different acceleration.

Thanks to Quantum Theory, Time might actually be discrete. There is the concept of the Planck Time, the smallest possible interval.

Oddly enough it can actually be the beginning of 2009 in London when it is still 2008 in Hawaii thanks to the magic of timezones!

**desert** · 02-09-2009, 22:45

Juvenal?

Aren't you the guy who wrote that Roman-Casse AAR in the TWCenter?

**Juvenal** · 02-10-2009, 10:10

Originally Posted by desert

Juvenal?

Aren't you the guy who wrote that Roman-Casse AAR in the TWCenter?

Yes, that is I, it was Juvenal's Journal.

You might recall that EB took a couple of years to deliver the first complete version (during which time RTR got all the way up to version 5). I joined here to get EB v0.80 and become involved in the EB community, but I ended up writing the AAR over at TWC because they had announced a competition.

I am mostly into IBFD7.03 at the moment.

Back on-topic, Time is a fascinating and elusive concept. We experience Time's Arrow as cause and effect, and yet our theories of physics seem to work for the most part equally well in both directions.

I seem to recall reading Feynmann writing about his Vacuum Diagrams, that he said a good interpretation for some interactions is to assume that some particles travel backwards in time so that they have a hand in their own creation!

**PBI** · 02-10-2009, 16:02

Originally Posted by Juvenal

Back on-topic, Time is a fascinating and elusive concept. We experience Time's Arrow as cause and effect, and yet our theories of physics seem to work for the most part equally well in both directions.

AFAIK, the big exception to this being the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I have heard it argued that this is the reason why we perceive an "Arrow of Time" in the first place.

I seem to recall reading Feynmann writing about his Vacuum Diagrams, that he said a good interpretation for some interactions is to assume that some particles travel backwards in time so that they have a hand in their own creation!

This is correct; in quantum field theory, an antiparticle is interpreted as being a normal particle travelling backwards in time.

I'm not sure whether this has any deeper significance however or if it is simply a convenient mathematical interpretation. However it is certainly true that particle physics, with the exception of the weak nuclear force, is time-reversible.