Hacker News Reader

Comment by artsyca | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure we'll eventually understand that our universe has no beginning and no end, it's a perpetual motion machine.

As well we'll understand that time is not the fourth dimension per se but the constraint that keeps everything happening in the 'now'

View on HN

I dunno. I'm not a physicist, but Time as a fourth dimension seems sensible. Since what you consider 'here' (your office, maybe) isn't the same as my 'here' (my living room, atm), why should your 'now' (2020-06-23) be the same as Ben Franklin's 'now' (eg: 1790-01-01)? Must any one 'now' be more significant than any other? A person has to be somewhere in time and space.

It's our shared now dude. We're in the here and now. Ben Franklin is dead as a motherfucker.

Well, he's dead to people in 2020, not to his contemporaries over in the 18th Century, if you catch my drift. And we're dead, to people in (most of) the possible 3020AD futures that branch out from 2020.

The hedge is in case there are some where medicine advances to the point where we live 1000 years :)

There's only one now. That's time forcing everything to happen all at once. Quit thinking like a classical physicist and take into account all the discoveries of recent years. I fucking hate this website why do I keep coming back to it?

  > There's only one now

Why, because you experience it? Is that different from saying the only place that exists is your office? That's just where you are.

Yea dude that's my theory that time is what keeps everything focused on one single now so that energy doesn't leak out to some other now somewhere else

There's nothing outside this one moment, ever.

It all moves together in perfect unison and that's why the speed limit is the speed of light.

Edit: for all these other histories happening outside of the now, they can't change shit about their timelines so they obviously don't have the same freedom of movement we do, do they?

That's over my head. Anyways, I shouldn't shoot my mouth off. Like I said, Physics is not my field :)

Dude computer science is the one field to rule them all

Reply on news.ycombinator.com