Registered: Aug 2005
Posts: 1

Whether you realize it or not, the paradox that you have described with regards to time and the now was first fully explicated in western philosophy by Aristotle in the Physics. (I can't remember what book, but shouldn't be hard to find.)

You should consider that instead of focusing the paradox on how time can move when movement implies time, think about the fact that no two moments can be now at the same time. So in order for the next moment to be now, the current moment has to pass away into the past and "immediately" be replaced by the next moment. But there can't be any time in between the two moments AND they can't both be at the same time.

Of course this gets to the nature of analyzing continuity with discrete things (moments). Don't you New Kind of Science people believe in a digital world? If so, this would be a real problem for that belief.

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Registered: Jun 2004
Posts: 78

I'm not really surprised. I don't know whether it was Aristotle or Zenon or somebody else to first raise this issue. What is much more surprising is that within next 2000+ years the issue was largely ignored, and language of math cannot be used to formulate the problem. Note: I don't say it can't be used to SOLVE the problem - much worse: it cannot FORMULATE it. My attempts to find any hint to possible resolution of this paradox in scientific or philosophic literature were not successful so far. There're books written specifically about the notion of time, but they dodge this problem (so, it's not quite clear what they are talking about). Would it be worthwhile to conduct an internet-wide brainstorm with the sole purpose: FORMULATE the problem consistently (and then talk about possible solutions).

P.S. I'm not really sure Aristotle or Zenon understood the issue in the same way as discussed above: namely, they presented a paradox; but my claim is: even paradox itself cannot be formulated in any language available to us (including the language of math)

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Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 172

Whether or not time passes between the in and out points of the "original (and only) Time's moments" sounds like one of those pure language problems. Is the problem not a physics problem but rather a consequence of using human language as our means-to-model?

By the way... are all humanly created models subject to the limitations of human presentation (language, writing, graphical) and ? Maybe the real workings of TIME are not totally and perfectly "model-able" by we humans.

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