That myth about time
A Wired article in this month’s issue prompted me to read Peter Lynds’ paper: Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity. To a person accustomed to accepted laws of physics, either by postulates, theorems or by established or practised theories, it’s a little hard to digest certain basic aspects that we normally take for granted. So, I almost read each sentence twice before understanding the impact of this paper. It’s really profound to say the least, in disillusioning time as an “instance”. The problem with all those theorems, laws and postulates are that, there are certain underlying assumptions that are normally accepted in order to arrive at the intended formulas.
In most formulas related to motion, inertia and force, that I use in my day-to-day work, time is a non-ignorable unit. It is virtually present in all of them. May be that is the problem. It’s not time at all but is an instance, as the author’s footnote says:
Please note that there is obviously no fault in the actual mathematics here, but rather in the historical assumption underlying them regarding determined physical magnitudes at a time and/or instant.
I barely got it. But, no matter what critics say, this paper does change the way I look at time henceforth. That is: it doesn’t stop. It is a continuum. Events cannot be defined accurately at any given time (as usually we consider in our very basic formulas of physics), because time does not stand still or freeze a frame even if an event is frozen at a given instance.