Physical reality is fundamentally timeless

Ladies and Gentlemen, what is time? Since my opponent failed to define the term we'll be using for this debate I'll be building my case around the following definition for the sake of argument;“a: the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues: durationb: a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future“1 Simply put, it is the process of changing states; the rate of which events, things and moments pass and change at a point in time. My opponent will argue that this rate of change does not exist in our physical universe, that it has no time. I however believe that in order for systems to change they require time. Nothing can truly happen instantly in the macro world and all motion requires some form of time to effectively do so. My main column will be the theory of special relativity, as my opponent has already brought to the table. Let us take his presentation and see what we make of it: “According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, the faster something moves, the slower its/his/her time passes RELATIVE to others. So, light can travel a mile and yet, not even the very least second has past (Taking into mind the incredible speed of light).“ What my opponent described I known as time dilation and is dictated by the value Gamma. If we have the frame of reference (FoR hereafter) T we know that a clock within that frame has no velocity in the same frame. This is the standby frame, it doesn't move in relations to us. A clock in the FoR T0 moving past us will inevitably have the velocity v in relations to us. Remember that in that reference frame the clock has no velocity and instead we zoom by with the velocity v. The clock will be synchronized and tick with the same rate, but because one is moving and the other is still they will seem to tick out of synch with each other; time flows at different rates. The ratio between the two rates is called Gamma in this context and is described with the following equation: With gamma being defined as: where c is the speed of light.2 Now, we can deduce from this that a light carrying photon moving at the speed of light experiences a complete halt in time; for if we fill in V = C we see that gamma approaches the undefined value of 1/0 from the positive side; Essentially becoming an infinite quantity. So now we have the interesting paradox: A photon must move the finite distance X without having any measurable velocity, or rather in an infinite amount of time. How can the photon complete this task? How does any light complete it's journey from it's source to your eyes if they, from their own FoR, do not move and nothing else does either. The answer to this paradox is that they are already there, for just as time collapses when you reach speed of light, so does space. May I present length contraction: the phenomenon that with increased velocity space decreases in the same ratio as time increases; the spacial counter to light dilation3. It too is dependant on Gamma and is defined in the following equation: Where L is the length observed by the FoR at motion, L0 is the length as measured by a FoR that is at rest and gamma holds the same definition as before. So as velocity approaches the speed of light gamma will become smaller and smaller and smaller, eventually resulting in the length becoming 0. The world of a proton is a strange and paradoxical one. The world as viewed by a proton moving at the speed of light is a frozen universe where length does not exist, every single location in space and time is condensed into a single point. A photon travelling will reach it's end location instantly if we ignore the fact that they slow down once they come across a medium such as the atmosphere. But does this mean that time does not exists? No, it simply means that time isn't an absolute value, it changes as we move around our physical world. It is a quantity we use to be able to distinguish the rate of change, the process of entropy increasing in the universe. We assume that for every action in the macro world there is a set time variable, something to define the world as every moment passes. In simple quantum systems time is reversible (think of a pendulum, from a physical viewpoint it would make no difference if time was reversed) but for the macro world you clearly see that there are changes in the universe, entropy is growing and change happens. Time is a linear fact. If you drop an egg you see that it moves down, towards the floor. You see it break and you notice the yolk spread. You never see the reverse happen, a broken egg does not spontaneously assemble itself, reform the shell, fly upward against gravity and land on the table. In fact, the light that went a mile did take time, it takes a little over 5 microseconds from all other FoR not included within the photon FoR. Microseconds are a ridiculously small amount of time, but it still seems an eternity if we compare it to the planck time, the smallest time unit possible; it is the time required for light to travel a single (reduced) planck length, the smallest length a photon can move, or at least that is how the theory goes.4 Readers of the debate, I'm terribly sorry that I had to bore you with physics and I promise the next rounds won't be so heavy, but I went into this detail explaining the concept of time dilation because it in itself is a case I can build upon: It is the dilation of time, the change of time flow. It helps us in keeping the light speed, the distance light travels in a single unit of time, the second. For something that does not exist in the physical world time is appearing unusually often in this equation. When we look at the clock what are we looking at? We're looking at change, we're looking at a process that is continuing and existing, changing in space as a function of time. We're looking at the fourth dimension influencing us, helping us remember that the past is gone, that the future is not yet here and that time is as real as the space it flows around in all it's dilating glory. 1) http://www.merriam-webster.com...2) http://www.pa.msu.edu...3) http://en.wikipedia.org...4) http://www.universetoday.com...