6mo ago

Time is one of the few everyday things we can measure, but cannot significantly alter

We have learned to approximate and then precisely measure time millennia ago through various means, yet never on this journey we learned to alter it, except by a miniscule margin using relativistic effects.

We can measure distance, and we can move things. We can measure illumination, and we can create light. We can measure sound, and produce it. Alter temperature? Yes! Produce all sorts of artificial radiation? Yes! Electric charge? Sure!

But time? Nuh-uh.

11 comments

- Lol
I would argue that moving things is not the same as changing a distance. If that were the case, then moving an event to a different time or our own moving forward in time would be the equivalent to moving an object through space, meaning we can alter time.
- Hmm, fair!
  Never thought of it that way. In these terms, spacetime is fairly consistent.
Time is just an illusion anyway. We can't measure time, because time is the measurement. It's how humans measure change. Fundamentally a second is no more "real" than a centimeter. You can't have a bag of either, so to speak. They're just abstract concepts.
- They all are concepts that can be tied to something material. We know how to manipulate matter to create more light, for example, yet lumen is as intangible as is centimeter
You can skip percieved time by sleeping.
You can also alter time by going fast. Satellites have to account for time dilation for their positioning.
- Sure, that's what I mentioned under relativistic effects
  But it's very minor and mostly hypothetical for anything but clock correction
  
  Fun fact about relative speeds though if you can drive at 1/5 of the speed of light you should never get a ticket for running a red light as all red light will be green due to the doppler effect. That said the speeding ticket you'll get...

11 comments