What is Present Time?

  • Thread starter Thread starter lemondiesel
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
L

lemondiesel

Guest
Does the present really exist?

Immediately Now, instantly becomes Past :confused:
 
lemondiesel said:
Does the present really exist?

Immediately Now, instantly becomes Past :confused:
Click to expand...
It does exist. Our consciousness and physical being exist in the Present Moment, not in the past, nor in the future. Eternity is Now.
 
andrew4096 said:
It does exist. Our consciousness and physical being exist in the Present Moment, not in the past, nor in the future. Eternity is Now.
Click to expand...
Will you be so kind to and describe to me this Eternal Now? ‘Now’ seems more like a philosophical concept than anything.
 
lemondiesel said:
Does the present really exist?

Immediately Now, instantly becomes Past :confused:
Click to expand...
Every object has a position in space and a position in time as well as a position in time. It also has a speed in which it changes the positions in both space and time (yes, objects do move through time at varying speeds according to the theory of relativity).

According to the current understanding of physics, there is a minimal indivisible amount of everything - minimum amount of energy, of space and of time (called Planck space/time/mass). So we move through discreet chunks of time and space.

So yes, there is a now - it’s the chunk of time you are currently passing through. The size of it is 5 times 10 to the power of minus 44 seconds - or, in decimal representation, 0.0000…[a total of 43 zeros] …05 s.

But here’s a thought that goes beyond your original question: the important word in the highlighted statement is you. There is a ‘now’ for your position in spacetime. The confusion starts when you try to consider, whether there is a ‘now’ for the whole universe. In other words - is there a common snapshot of time for everything - does everything go through the same chunk of time all the time? Instinctively the answer seems to be ‘yes’. However experiments involving both quantum phenomena and relativity seem to contradict that.
 
lemondiesel said:
Does the present really exist?

Immediately Now, instantly becomes Past :confused:
Click to expand...
Of course it does, but don’t you ask how long does the present last? Well that depends. Go to the dentist and it lasts for an hour, after that its in the past. Go on a week’s holiday and the present lasts a week. Teenagers live in the present and it can last years.

But here is an extension to your puzzle. Do we live in the present? By that I mean are the sun and stars in the present like we on earth are or are they the past? According to modern physics we see the past, back to millions of years ago. That being so, maybe the stars were gone by the time the earth ‘evolved’.

Here is something on time that might bring some response.

And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of the heaven,
to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons,
and for days and years. (Gen. 1:14)

Time is defined, after Aristotle, as ‘the numbering of motion according to the before and after.’ Time then is the duration of motion or change in which all things happen. It therefore came into being with matter. All matter is in a process in its existence (the law of entropy-decay – the Second law of thermodynamics). Everything is undergoing energy breakdown, from the stars to the earth and all things on it. Now a process in motion is something changing, and change needs time to run its course. The very existence of ‘time’ shows there was a beginning, and not so long ago, because, as the Law of burn-out dictates, if everything was here forever, all would be burned down to zero energy matter by now, which is not the case.
Measuring time is of course not time itself. We measure time according to God’s plan, the ordained movement of the cosmos, but specifically the daily and yearly cycle of the sun, stars and seasons. Thus the first object of astronomy was measuring time, begun, we know, by the first people to inhabit the earth. Every measurement - from the watch on your hand to the calendar on your wall - is but a division of the cosmic day and the cosmic year. Of crucial importance in any sane and rational concept of time is that it has to be universal, that is, all time must be the same for everyone. When we relate to the past, present and future, it should go without saying, we must all have the same understanding of it. Fortunately, for most of us, apart from the space-time relativists that is, this is how it is, has always been, and always will be.
Dogmas held by the Catholic Church must surely need true time and space forming an absolute framework within which the material and spiritual events of the world and man run their course in imperturbable order. Such at least is demanded by the Christian intellect and is reflected in the Scriptures and in scholastic philosophy and theology. This created God time of the world is the same to every observer, in every era and every place. Accordingly, for a true Christian understanding of the creation and the measurement of time, the whole universe, from the earth to the furthest star, has to be incorporated together as a unit, that is, to serve its purpose in the order of things. As to the empirical credibility of such things, well they are what we observe, what we actually see and measure every day and year of our lives; what is, and is philosophically as plausible as God being able to create the universe in the first place.

‘The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son,
this day have I begotten thee. (Ps 2:7) and (Heb 5:5-6)

How then does the universe comply with what we shall call ‘Genesis-time’? What is the one and only order of the universe that serves both Revelation and mankind, time for us to shelter, feed and cloth ourselves, time for work, rest and sleep, time for travel and discovery, time to live and time to die? Surely it must be that God achieved the measurement of time by incorporating the whole cosmos (everything and everyone) within a finite revolving geocentric universal timepiece. The sun, planets and stars, as we observe, participate together in this cosmic clock, no matter how many of them there are or how far away they are, no matter whether they can be seen by the naked eye or not, no matter their distances, every star in the heavens is married to the sun in movement. A ‘day’ then, is actually a universal day everywhere, and a year is a universal year, everywhere.
 
Actually, the brains who study this have discovered that for humans, “now” is actually a footprint in time that lasts 8-12 seconds. It is this phenomenon that allows us to string words together into sentences; if it weren’t for that, once we got one word out of our mouths, we would forget what the next word was going to be. I’ve seen films of people who have had a stroke that destroyed the part of the brain that does that, and they simply are not able to talk.

DaveBj
 
lemondiesel said:
Does the present really exist?

Immediately Now, instantly becomes Past :confused:
Click to expand...
Hi, lemondiesel,

Although I don’t have the education of the posters who gave the science orientated definition of the present as either 44/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a second or 8 to 12 seconds, I think I can give a pragmatical and philosophical answer to your question.

Yes, the present exists, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Now, personally, I envision Creation (all the cosmos) as a space/time structure in infinity and eternity. This is one way how “now” could also be eternal.

God loves you,
Don
 
DaveBj said:
Actually, the brains who study this have discovered that for humans, “now” is actually a footprint in time that lasts 8-12 seconds. It is this phenomenon that allows us to string words together into sentences; if it weren’t for that, once we got one word out of our mouths, we would forget what the next word was going to be. I’ve seen films of people who have had a stroke that destroyed the part of the brain that does that, and they simply are not able to talk.

DaveBj
Click to expand...
Strangely, I think that both you and ypopp and stenlis (who gave the duration of the smallest quantum time) are correct. “Now,” from a philosophical, and perhaps a physical, standpoint, is an instantaneous slice of a time continuum, and the quantum or Planck time is the smallest possible duration. But for humans, the persistence of memory needs at least those 8 to 12 seconds to give a perception of continuity.

We are like a long movie film. Our consciousness illuminates only one frame at a time. The preceding frame is past, the next frame is future.

Philosophically, this means that we can never possess the totality of our existence at once. We can never fully possess our entire being until our life has run its course. God, however, perceives all frames of the move at once. He possesses his whole existence as simply now. (Of course, he perceives our existence in the same way.)
 
your posts are interesting to read thanks everyone!

its just weird that as soon as I typed that last d in typed, it is already past.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top