What Is Time? One Researcher Shares His Exploration 578
Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."
Time (Score:5, Funny)
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
FORD: No, No listen. Just imagine that you’ve got this ebony bath, right? And it’s conical.
ARTHUR: Conical? What kind of bath is -
FORD: No, no, shh, shhh, it’s, it’s, it’s conical okay? So what you do, you fill it with fine white sand right? Or sugar, or anything like that. And when it’s full, you pull the plug out and it all just twirls down out of the plug hole but the thing is
ARTHUR: Why?
FORD: No, the clever thing is that you film it happening. You get a movie camera from somewhere and actually film it. But then you thread the film in the projector backwards.
ARTHUR: Backwards?
FORD: Yeah, neat you see. So what happens is you sit and you watch it and then everything appears to swirl upwards, out of the plug hole and fill the bath amazing.
ARTHUR: And that’s how the universe began?
FORD: No. But it’s a marvellous way to relax.
TRILLIAN: Funny man.
FORD: Well it broke the ice didn’t it?
Re:Timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Time (Score:3, Funny)
LOL, posted at 2:33.
Re:Time (Score:5, Funny)
Edward Teach meet Time Zones [wikipedia.org]. Times Zones, Edward.
Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you need to study the concept more.
Re:[...]you can't turn an omelet into an egg. (Score:2, Funny)
actually, its fowl
Re:Time (Score:3, Funny)
Eddies in the space time continuum?
Re:[...]you can't turn an omelet into an egg. (Score:5, Funny)
automate it with a shell script
Re:[...]you can't turn an omelet into an egg. (Score:3, Funny)
it's just one of his yolks, although he might have poached it.
Re:Time (Score:5, Funny)
Well get him out, then. We just cleaned it.
The simple answer (Score:1, Funny)
Time is what you are wasting right now.
Re:Time (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Timeline (Score:4, Funny)
could ever experience anything truly random?
Halt! As Captain of the Internets, I cannot stand to hear you lies anymore! No randomness? Blasphemy! Lunacy! Have you ever been to Wikipedia? The dark corners of the Internet, such as 4chan? Fark? IRC? Had you been there, you would have seen the reality of randomness! Now repent your crimes before I am forced to put you into the Total Perspective Vortex with a half naked anime character, a motivational poster, and a Wiki article on the nature of the Etruscan language, which you got to by starting on the page on pastrie!
Re:Timeline (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Timeline (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What Is Time? (Score:1, Funny)
it's just like the help you get at microsoft's website. the answer will be flawlessly worded and technically correct, but you're still no closer to solving your problem
Re:What Is Time? (Score:1, Funny)
Time is something I measure in paychecks.
Re:Invoking Occam (Score:3, Funny)
I saw that coming.