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Friday, April 24, 2009

There is no time. There is only now.

In fact, says (Seth) Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

By Tim Folger. Found on the lemonspank. Originally from Discover Magazine. Time is something man thought up to measure the relative speeds of different things. As far as the universe is concerned, there is no time, there is only now.

1 comment:

  1. "As far as the universe is concerned, there is no time, there is only now."

    Which would be the case if we were moving through the 4th dimension at the speed of light. Just FYI.

    ReplyDelete