[card_zero]

If we say that seconds "pass", at what rate do they pass? Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second? That would entail outer seconds (second seconds, if you like). Which also have their own rate at which they pass, so now we need a third-level "flow of time", and so on.

So to say seconds "pass" is describing something else. They aren't moving.

[ben_w]

> If we say that seconds "pass", at what rate do they pass?

One second per second for yourself, but other observers generally disagree.

Or one could use it as an inverse of the things measured against time, so meters/second of speed can be turned into seconds flowing at a rate of length.

Does "miles per gallon" lead to similar questions about gallons passing?

> Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second?

Only, and always, from the point of view of people in different frames of reference.

[card_zero]

You're talking about something else. Or rather, my line of argument ran into a distraction hazard, namely relativity. I wasn't trying to talk about relativity, but I should have seen that coming. And now everybody's very keen to explain relativity to me, dammit.

[ben_w]

I did give a response to the non-relativity interpretation too.

Sure, it wasn't clear which way you were going with that question, but I recognised that it could have been either.

[card_zero]

Time having a static existence, and all moments of time being equally real, ought to boggle the mind. Then again, it's not compulsory to be boggled, goodness knows it's exhausting and doesn't accomplish much.

[ben_w]

Hm.

I only find that boggling in the context we both agree you're not using: relativity (block universe in particular).

In so far as we ignore all of relativity because it's so counter-intuitive and strange, "all moments of time being equally real" seems as trivial and straightforward as "all places in cartesian 3-dimensional space being equally real".

But yes, boggling is never compulsory.

[oersted]

I feel like you are overthinking it a bit, entangled in semantics. You can take any process that has a fixed frequency (like a clock), and measure the change in frequency in different situations, from the same point of reference. Moving that device at different speeds or into different places in a gravitational field. This is why satellite clocks move at a different rate than those on Earth.

Practically speaking, that's really what we care about when we talk about the speed of time. If some process takes a certain amount of time to complete, sending it to space and back, without changing anything else about it, might make it complete earlier from our point of reference.

It is actually about seconds per second, and there is an inner and an outer second as you say. There’s nothing wrong with that, because it is always a relative difference between two frames of reference. There are the seconds for our point of view, and there are the seconds for the device we are sending to space and back.

I think you are struggling to understand how to measure the absolute speed of time, but there’s no such thing, it’s always a comparison, it is relative.

[card_zero]

I think our language is filled with misleading semantics about the flow of time, the passing of time, past, present, future, the arrow of time, all of that. It would be hopeless to try to use different language. But time isn't doing anything. There's no time for time to do anything in.

I'll acknowledge relativity and different frames of reference, but that isn't really the point.

[oersted]

Things happen, some things happen before other things. We count time by using clocks, they tick at regular rates with respect to other things happening.

If a clock is in a frame of faster time, it will tick faster, its ticks will happen before, than an identical clock in a frame of slower time.

That’s how I see time, it is the ordering of physical events, which we can trivially observe.

You keep trying to explain time as if it was a thing of its own, like a water flow, but it is no more than an abstraction to indicate how some things happen before others, and they definitely do, at least in the same frame.

This analogy is insufficient as well of course. For instance, if we have two clocks, we move one onto a faster time frame for a while and then bring it back, it is as if the clock was an ordered stack of physical events, the ordering between the events in either stack is tricky to determine, but you could clearly observe that one stack was more filled than the other.

I am not trying to get into a fight, this is simply a welcome exercise that forces me to crystallize my own understanding, hope it is for you too.

[_bernd]

> That’s how I see time, it is the ordering of physical events, which we can trivially observe.

My teacher explained it in a similar way. Time passes when we can observe change. If there is no change then we can not measure time. Like with the heat death of the universe. At that time (lol) no more time would "happening".

[oersted]

What I ask myself is: is time purely the ordering of things that happen, or do gaps where there is potential for something to happen also count?

Let's assume for simplicity that time is a discrete dimension, which it might be. Then there would be a measure of distance of how many ticks of potential events there are between two actual events, even if nothing happened in between. Or maybe that's not the case and it's more of a directed graph defining the partial ordering of actual events.

Not sure if we could measure that in any case, we always need some kind of actually ticking clock, and it's not like we can isolate a period of time where nothing happens globally, unless its in a simulation. Just like weird things happen at quantum scale, I'm sure weird things happen at small enough time scales where there's really nothing between one event and the next, and there's no good way to determine how far a part they are.

[raldi]

You’ve never listened to a podcast at a rate of 1.5 seconds per second?