Assume space-time is quantized. This would mean that space-time is broken up into discrete bits. It then follows that time is broken up into discrete bits. This disagrees with basic experience: we can start counting time at any arbitrary point. “Now” could be any time whatsoever. Moreover, we run our physical experiments at any given point; we don’t have to wait to start our clocks. But what if our ability to run experiments at any […]
Category: time
What Science Ignores
I was skimming the philosophy blogs today and came across “Should Scientific Methods and Data be Public?” over at It’s Only A Theory (and Brains for that matter). Gualtiero Piccinini argues that scientific matters ought to be made public. My first thought was, “What exactly does G.P. mean by public?” and my second was, “Anyone who doesn’t think scientific methods should be public is bat-shit crazy.” (Yes, I get angry about this stuff. And from […]
Time and the Limits of Science
Measurement takes time; measurement is a process. So the measurement of time immediately yields this theoretical issue: Since measurement takes time, our ability to break time into ever smaller pieces will always be proportional to the method of measurement used. The faster our measurement device that measures time, the more divisible time will be. Insofar as there are limits to how fast a measurement process can occur (relativistic or other), there will be limits on […]
something about time
There is something about time that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. We measure time by agreeing upon an event and then counting from that point onward. Today is October 17, 2008 AD. It is this AD that keeps my attention. It has been 2008 years, ten months and seventeen days since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth: AD stands for Anno Domini, or year of our lord. Those not wanting to be explicitly […]
Positive and Negative Biological Time
In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation. Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending […]