∆ 2 Kilometres yes, Hours no ?...

We may 'SAY' things move and change 'Over Time'. But does this phrase actually have any 'real' meaning at all? Or is it just a familiar phrase?

You can choose to compare the speed of a car to anything you like .To the speed of a rotating hand on a numbered dial. To the rotation of the Earth itself, or to anything else. But this wouldn't prove that the past, the future, or time exist.

We may ‘say’ a car can travel at ‘100 kilometres per hour’, then surely ‘the car’, ‘kilometres’, and ‘hours’ must all exist - because things must 'take time' to move, how else could motion possibly be explained?

Careful examination of the observable facts shows that this can be seen to be a rushed, or jumped to, conclusion. While Cars and Kilometres motion (and energy) are reasonably tangible, ‘hours’ are not. so perhaps there are just cars, km and ‘motion’.

Back to >> ∆ Timeless v.Time distinctions (Rhetoric and Semantics).

Is there 'Motion Only' ?

The previous sections have dealt with analysing the past and suggesting that just because there is real physical evidence of past events inside and outside of our own bodies this does not prove that there is also a temporal record of the past.

Because of the subject of this book the motive behind this reasoning is of course to undermine the notion of Time being real.

If I can show that past events are not recorded, in ‘the past’, then perhaps this mysterious past does not exist (other than as a useful notion) and seeing as the past is a critical component in the concept of Time genuinely existing, perhaps then existence of Time can also be doubted.

While considering this you may feel however as if you are watching one of those magicians or mentalists on TV. What they say and do seems to be legitimate at every step but you also know that something is missing and you feel you are being conned. The reason for this is that although I have constantly referred to, and relied on the idea of ‘just motion in the present’ (i.e. timeless moment), I haven’t yet discussed preciesly what is meant by this.

It is critical that we understand how it can make sense to say that ‘motion may just be happening without time’, because we generally consider Time to be essential for motion to happen. And conversley, motion being a proof that time exists. Our reasoning for believing this is summed up in the expression that, ‘things take Time to move’.

So if I am saying there is no such thing as Time, just motion and change, I may seem to be completely contradicting myself. It’s as if I am claiming that ‘I don’t need Time to exist, I just need motion and change, i.e. everything that Time makes happen - to exist’.

Of the main distinctions involved in Time, namely the past, the present and the future, ‘the present’ is the only one that stands up to direct scrutiny, and therefore the only element that someone believing Time exists and someone believing Time does not exist might agree on.

However, persistent illusions being what they are it isn't quite that simple, and for timelessness to be valid a clear explanation of the properties of the present is needed.

So let's examine the ‘present moment’ and the idea that things take Time to move.

Things don’t 'take' Time to move.

However we say it, it seems that things can only move and change ‘with Time’, ‘in Time’, ‘over Time’ or ‘through Time’ so we are saying that Time is an essential ingredient in the universe for movement and change to happen.,

If we are waiting for a bus it will take Time to arrive and if we plant a seed in the ground it can’t instantly sprout into a rose bush or an oak tree, it will take Time to grow. So it would seem then that without Time nothing could happen and everything would stop.

We imagine that in a timeless universe everything would remain completely as it is but stuck ‘frozen’ solid. Or even worse! If it turns out that things need Time not only to move and change but also just to exist then if there was no such thing as Time there would be no Time for things to exist and so absolutely everything would have vanish … Or so it might seem.

‘Kilometres’ per ‘hour’? Are you sure they both exist?

It may seem that ‘distances’, kilometres, miles and so on exist, and it may seem that ‘times’, hours, and minutes etc exist, so km per hour seems to make sense. But what happens to time if it is only the things that we actually see i.e. ‘Distances’, and ‘speeds’, that exist?

Our first reasoning for thinking that things need Time to move is because we observe that things do move and because we have things called clocks.

We can very effectively and usefully measure, compare and even pre-dict or say-ahead, the speeds of different objects in motion over varying distances, using rulers and clocks, and we can express this speed in familiar and useful terms such as ‘metres per second’ or ‘kilometres per hour’.

Billions of people and billions of machines constantly use this way of measuring speed highly effectively and it does its job admirably.

It doesn’t even seem to matter too much what units of distance and Time you use as long as you pick one of each that is suitable to the job you are doing. But all is not as it appears. So let's look at an example.

The speed of a car.

To measure the speed of a car we could accurately measure out a certain stretch of road and drive the car the measured distance while timing the journey.

So let's imagine we have a very sedate vehicle, say a golf cart and we want to find its top speed.

We mark out a section of road 1 km long and drive the cart along the measured distance. From onboard the cart we use a stopwatch or clock to measure how much Time it takes to cover this distance.

At the end of the run we find that it took an entire hour to cover the single kilometre, and so we can say that

‘The carts speed is one kilometre per hour’.

And all seems well because within this single sentence we have seemingly merged distance and Time in a useful way and because distance clearly seems to exist and the mixing of distance and Time seems to work, we conclude that Time must also exist with the same level of certainty that distance exists.[1]

When we do this however we have made an error, because all we are really doing is trusting that our clock is accurate, and then comparing the rate or speed at which the clock hand moves with the rate or speed at which the cart moves. But when we do this we discreetly throw in a couple of seemingly insignificant extra terms and create the notion of Time !

Comparing rates.

To put this another way imagine that the clock or stopwatch we used was a very simple device comprising of one single ‘hand’ that rotated about the clock face at such a rate that in precisely one hour the tip[2] of the clock hand covered precisely one metre.

(A clock like this would be very unusual and I'm choosing to invent it just to make any maths easy to follow, but you could produce such a clock very easily by carefully choosing the size of the clock face and adjusting the speed of the clock hand [3])

Using this clock to measure the speed of our cart as it travels along the measured kilometre we find again that as the cart completes 1 km the clock indicates that one hour has past so we could again express this as the carts speed being 1 km per hour, but we can now also express this in another way by saying,

‘The cart moved 1,000 metres while the clock hand moved 1 single metre.’

The first difference to notice here is that this second explanation doesn’t directly mention hours or Time.

What's more significant though is that we could in fact express the cart’s speed in an even simpler way by saying.

‘The cart moved 1000 times the speed of the ‘clock’ hand’.

Here we are expressing the speed of the cart not in terms of kilometres per hour but just in terms of it being so many times faster or slower than something else.

In this case the something else happens to be the tip of the clock hand that we deliberately engineered and manufactured so as to move steadily and at a certain particular rate.

However surely if we are saying the same thing in three different ways we are learning nothing and just wasting ‘Time’ going round in circles so to speak. What’s more this expression ‘the cart is going so many times faster than our special and unique clock hand’ isn't very useful to other people.

In fact unless everyone in the world had precisely the same kind of unusual clock, moving at the same speed and made to be exactly the same size, the information we give out about the carts speed in this way would be useless so what’s the point?

The point is that if you examine things carefully you find that it transpires whenever we discuss speed, although we fool ourselves into thinking otherwise, all we are ever doing is comparing the speeds of two different ‘things’ and not realising this has significant consequences relating to our understanding of Time and motion.

This may not seem to be the case and it may not seem to matter but remember we are trying to uncover a persistent illusion, and such illusions hide their secrets in many ways, and if you examine what actually happens when we discuss speeds you may find that hours, minutes and seconds suddenly lose their meaning and therefore effectively disappear[4] and that the idea that things need Time to move is seen to be equally unfounded !

Simplifying motion.

To untangle this point let's imagine a very simple if slightly abstract scenario.

Using a simple clock to ‘Time’ an object travelling over some straight-line distance isn't too complicated but it does involve comparing the rotational motion of a clock hand, the number of degrees it has gone through, or how much of a full rotation it has completed, to the linear distance the linearly moving object is covering.

To eliminate some of the confusion this slight conversion produces the previous exercise used the idea of just comparing the distance the cart moved to the ‘distance the clock hand had moved’. This avoided us having to mix straight line distances with angles, degrees of rotation or ‘hours and minutes’ although they may still seem to be involved.

We can look at motion in another way by just considering what happens when we compare and measure the motion of 2 separate and smoothly rotating objects.

This can be easier on the mind because although we are thinking about 2 moving things they are both just simply rotating constantly on the spot without going anywhere and in a way nothing much changes throughout the following thought experiment.

Comparing roundabouts.

Imagine that we arrive at a playground and we see two very large and simple ‘roundabout’ style rides. Both still in motion and each one rotating in the same direction.

For our experiment we imagine that the playground rides are both made to an incredibly high standard and that each roundabout is resting on perfect bearings and has no wind resistance, so the speed at which each roundabout is rotating is constant, i.e. not slowing down at all while we examine them.[5]

The first thing we can probably deduce by looking at the scene is whether one ride is rotating significantly faster than another or whether they are rotating at very similar rates.

We can make this deduction by labelling the roundabouts ‘A’ and ‘B’ for clarity then deliberately spraying a distinctive reference marks, (with biodegradable paint of course) on each roundabout[6].

This way we can clearly see when either ride completes a revolution, and we can also easily compare their relative motion.

If the marks on both roundabouts repeatedly match up together then we could say that the roundabout’s speeds matched perfectly.

Different roundabout speeds. Revolutionary theories/times.

If however the mark on roundabout B seems to overtake that on A then B must be rotating faster than A and we can look at ways to compare and express the difference in their speeds.

To do this we can use some left over paint and make a reference mark on the ground in front of each roundabout, then we can start accurately counting and comparing the number of times A and B each rotate.

These speeds might not be precise multiples of each other but the more revolutions we count the better our comparison of the different speeds will be.

It could however transpire that while we counted one single rotation of roundabout A, roundabout B made precisely four revolutions.

We can continue to count revolutions and find unsurprisingly that this multiple of four was constant so as A completes 2 then 3 complete rotations B makes 8 and then 12 rotations and so on.

B is 4 Times faster than A.

So, without a ‘clock’ or any real way to measure Time, we can to a level of accuracy limited only by our resources and ingenuity compare the speeds of 2 rotating objects and in this case declare that B is rotating 4 times faster than A.

And so it seems that this is all we can do, Without access to a clock

we can’t really say anything about Time, or how long ‘it’ actually takes for A to rotate or for B to rotate.

If we had to report our findings to some remote group all we could tell them with certainty would be just that ‘we had found 2 roundabouts’, and, ‘one roundabout was spinning so many ‘times’ faster or slower than the other’… which would be fairly useless information, unless you knew the speed of either roundabout. (SECTION REPEATED pick best ver XXX)

Kid on bike.

But then we get a new glimmer of hope, a kid on a bike whizzes by past two fixed lampposts at a constant rate,

Not only this but while he whizzes by we notice that as he passes from the first lamp post to the second - roundabout ‘A’ makes precisely one complete revolution.

What’s more we have a tape measure on us and find the lampposts to be exactly 100 metres apart,

so we get back on the telephone and tell our friends that we can now tell them the actual speed, or rate of rotation of one of the roundabouts, so we phone in and tell them that roundabout A rotates precisely once as a kid on a bike covers 100 metres !

Of course our friends on the phone are not impressed because they now want to know just how fast the kid on the bike was going! And unless we give them that information we haven’t actually told then anything new about the roundabout’s speed.

All we have done is compared it’s rotation to yet another thing.

We might for a moment think we could get out of the fix buy telling them that the speed the kid on the bike is travelling at is in fact ‘100 metres per revolution of roundabout A’ but of course this is no help, were just expressing the bike’s speed in terms of roundabout A, and then A in terms of the speed of the bike.

However, if it turned out that the speed the kid on the bike was travelling was some universally maximum and constant speed, then this information would become useful to our friends no matter where in the universe they were. So here in this simplified thought experiment the speed of the kid relates to the universally constant speed of light ‘C’.

So we could compare the speed of a point on the roundabout with the speed of the kid on the bike – and because the kid’s speed was a universal constant the information we phone to our friends ‘Roundabout A is going at half ‘C’. The point here being that we are still just expressing a speed of one thing in terms of it being a fraction of the speed of another. But when we use the speed of light we don’t express it in terms of distance over time – because there is no proof that things need time to move, but there is proof that things ‘just’ move.

Sunrise to sunset.

But all is not lost, because If like most playgrounds this one is outside, and we have a clear view of the sky then we can monitor one roundabout and count the number of revolutions it makes while the Earth itself rotates!

We might find it just so happened that from one sunrise to sunrise roundabout A made 240 complete revolutions, and now it would seem that rather than comparing roundabouts to each other or to random kids on random bikes, and vice versa, we actually had some valuable, empirical and useable information to convey to our friends waiting anxiously on the telephone!

‘Knowing’ as we do(or more accurately ‘declaring’) that there are 24 hours in a day, and that roundabout A made 240 rotations from sunrise to sunrise simple mates shows us this equates to a speed or rate of 10 revolutions per hour.

We also know roundabout B is spinning 4 times as fast as A which now becomes a useful fact because we can easily calculate B to be completing ‘40 revolutions per hour’.

So we phone in our new information about A in terms of revolutions per hour, we can even work out the speed of B and the actual speed of the kid on the bike if we wish, and everything seems fine.

Can you smell a rat where exactly are these mysterious hours?

Hopefully you may already smell a rat here.

Monitoring our two roundabouts A and B and comparing their speeds didn’t give us useful information to report to our friends on the telephone.

When we excitedly tell them we have some new information and that by checking things against the sunrise we now know that A is rotating at 10 revolutions per hour, we are really just saying what we first discovered, namely that A is rotating 240 times a ‘day’, but in different units.

In other words all we are still saying is that A is rotating 240 times faster than some other rotating thing.

In this case the other rotating thing happens to be the Earth – but, and this is a critical point, we express this comparison of speeds in terms of revolutions per ‘hour’.

We apparently see ‘Days’ then ‘hours’ appear.

So somewhere in the above logic ‘hours’ suddenly appeared and the question is how and where did ‘hours’ come from and is there ‘real’ existence justified?

The error arose when, knowing that the Earth is rotating, we started using the sunrise to compare the Earth’s rotational speed to the speed of the simple roundabout.

Then we say roundabout A makes 240 revolutions per day.

And in this moment the notion of a day is created.

At this point it is absolutely critical that we are very clear on just what this reference to a ‘day’ really is, and really is not, because it is in the casual and innocent misuse of this tiny word that the all the trouble leading to the entire ‘illusion of time’ can be seen to start.

Do ‘days’ really exist?

If you grab a rocket ship and fly off to examine the Earth from outer-space you will[7] find that it is rotating, and that it is rotating in the vicinity of one particularly close and therefore very bright and un-ignorable star, i.e. our sun.

As you fly around the globe you will notice that whatever side of it is facing the sun will of course be constantly well lit, and the opposite side will appear darker purely because it is shielded from the sunlight by the rest of the Earth itself. However if you keep flying around randomly circling the equator or from pole to pole you won’t find any ‘days’.

Sitting on the Earth we can choose to note that the Earth is spinning, and choose to pick a close or distant star to monitor this rotation, and we can choose to say that whenever we see the sun (or any other star) at a similar place in the sky it marks the start and end of a ‘day’, but that is just arbitrary/subjective idea.

From the point of view of a rotating thing, it is just rotating, it doesn’t really make ‘one complete rotation’ then go on to make ‘a second complete rotation’[8].

In these examples, because we are talking about rotating objects the idea of a ‘complete’ revolution comes naturally and has some meaning and is useful but we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that just because the idea of ‘complete revolutions’ exists and makes some sense that this is a proof that Time and ‘units of Time’ also exist.

If for example instead of comparing rotating things we were comparing the (constant) straight line speeds of two objects, say a golf cart and a cyclist then we would have to arbitrarily choose the distance we compared their speeds over, or send them both off from a fixed starting line and at any distance away from the line ask them both to stop. Comparing the distances covered would reveal their relative speeds.

Are hours, really parts of a day?.

The danger of naming the ‘day’ is that it then implies Time exists.

Before we consider this carefully enough to decide if it is true, we then rush off to divide this day up for convenience into 24 ‘hours’

Of course we also know that this ‘24’ is just an arbitrary number[9] and it could be any number we wish as long as everyone using the system agrees otherwise we would end up with conversion and accuracy problems.

The problem is that instead of calling these 24 divisions ‘degrees’ or some other un-loaded term we use the word ‘hours’ and by hours we mean ‘a measurement of Time’.

We then ‘sell’ (without even appearing to do so) the idea that these ‘hours’ aren’t just sections of a circle, degrees, or distances you could mark out around the edge of a sphere, (be it a small sphere or one the size of the Earth), but that these ‘units’ are units of a thing called Time’ !

Doing it by degrees.

Imagine we didn’t use such loaded units for our mathematics.

We observe that roundabout A makes 240 revolutions from sunrise to sunrise.

We know the Earth is ‘round’ and is also rotating.

We declare that we can choose to divide a round thing up into 360 equal sections and we shall call these sections ‘degrees’.

Now using simple maths we could work out how many degrees the Earth rotates through while roundabout A makes a single revolution.

Or how many times ‘A’ rotates while the Earth goes through 90 degrees, or 100 degrees, or 200 and so on but at the heart of the matter we should be able to realise that all we are doing is using mathematical tools to express in different ways the simple fact that ‘one thing is rotating constantly and 240 times faster than another constantly rotating thing’.

When we phone our friends and express the rotation in terms of hours it seems like we have given them actually useful information but in fact it is only useful if they happen to know how fast the Earth rotates! and if you think about it you can see that the speed the Earth is rotating at is just an arbitrary rate.

The Earth’s rotation is a result of how much matter happened to fall together under the force of gravity to form the Earth and some kind of average of all the various masses and velocities of each separate dust particle or meteorite that came together. In this way its rate of rotation is just as arbitrary as the rotation of either of the roundabouts in our thought experiment left spinning by some fictitious child.

If we are phoning Earthbound friends then all is fine, because they can observe the Earth rotation from wherever they happen to be. But if we have alien friends, then expressing the speed of ‘A’ in terms of the speed of the Earth’s rotation is just as meaningful or meaningless as expressing it in terms of ‘B’, or the speed of the kid on the bike.

Why is what system we use to measure and compare speeds so important?

This is important because we think we have said something extra or empirical when we use the terms days and hours.

As I hope I demonstrated with the discussion on vision, the important details can seem insignificant even when pointed to very directly.

In the case we are discussing above it seems that when using mathematics to usefully compare the speeds of the Earth and the roundabouts rotation it doesn’t seem to matter whether we use hours or degrees (an hour on a 24 hour clock face is in fact just 15 degrees) – we still get useful figures and essentially agree ‘A’ rotates 240 times faster than the Earth.

But when we use the word ‘hours’ instead of degrees, we invoke the notion of Time and we start talking about something new, invisible, unperceivable, and surreal as if it is taken for granted to obviously exist, just like ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ even though we haven’t proved anything about time at all.

If we go over the actually observed facts when we arrive at the playground we first see 2 things both existing and moving, whatever that means, in this case ‘rotating’.

So restless beasts as we are we start trying to compare their speeds.

We find we can do this without using units of Time, and express the answer without using units of Time. But just as a factor, and we find ‘A’ is 4 times faster than ‘B’.

Then to make our information more useful we compare one of the roundabouts to the rotation of the Earth itself.

We then express the rotational speed of A in terms of revolutions per day or per hour !.

And it is at this point that we add something extra and nebulous or surreal to what we actually directly observe with our own senses – namely we add to the observation that things exist and move- the ‘fact’ that days and hours and Time exists, and what is this ‘Time’? well it’s the stuff that things need in which to move!

Note that above I talked of ‘motion existing, but I didn’t explain what it is or how it works, but notice also that saying ‘Time is what enables motion’ does no better, and is actually just rhetoric with no real content. We may assume it means something because we hear other people say it and assume they know what it means even if we don’t!

Note also here that while there are a lot of self referring arguments going on one of the most incestuous arises when we ask ‘how long is a day?’ The answer usually given is ’24 hours’ and when we ask how long an hour is, the answer is ‘one 24^th of a day’. In other words a day, is a day long.

What is more, in the most unscientific way possible the proof that Time exists seems to be as follows…

• ‘we propose that things need Time to move.

• We observe that things do move,

• therefore Time must exist’.

This is a very poor argument because we can use the same kind of logic to prove that ‘invisible frogs’ exist as follows…

• ‘It may be that things need help from ‘invisible frogs’ to be able to move.

• ‘Things do move,

• therefore ‘invisible frogs’ exist’!

At the risk of going round in circles (sorry) let me re express the importance of not just accepting this ‘thin end of the wedge’ we call a day, which leads up to weeks months years millennia and eons and down to Hours minutes seconds milliseconds and beyond.

When we conjure up the idea of Time in the form of days, and then hours and so on we also conjure up a tremendous amount of extra ‘bizarre’ completely unseen and unproven concepts.

We start by observing rotating objects. In the example we observe roundabouts and paint marks. We observe that we can count, and do mathematics, and compare the speeds of objects.

We monitor a couple of sunrises and we call one complete revolution of the Earth a ‘day’ (although it never starts or stops at any one place)

For mathematical convenience we chop the Earth’s rotation in to 24 smaller more manageable segments and instead of calling them ‘twenty fourths’ or ’15 degree increments’ we use the word ‘hour’ and so we imply Time.

And we imply that things move over Time, extra to this are the associated assumptions that not only is there the present moment but also something ‘behind it’, a massive and ever growing kind of visible, but not really visible, ‘thing’ which apparently can’t even really be called a thing but is ‘the past ‘which can be seen but never changed!

Along with days and hours there is also a probably infinitely large, and completely invisible, though partially predictable ‘thing’ that isn't a thing, that also can’t ever be directly seen but may be influenced and planned for, called ‘the future’.

And… we also imply that the present 3 dimensional moment that we actually live in and directly observe is really an infinitely thin slice or ‘moment of Time’ sandwiched between the ‘past’ and the ‘future’.

So not only do things take Time to move, but they all do so in an infinitely thin slice of it!

If this sounds complicated and bizarre then I agree, and admittedly we haven’t addressed the apparently real future yet, but it seems to me that everything becomes complicated and circular only when you start insisting there is more to the world than you actually observe.

Is everything relative?

So we may seem slightly doomed here, we can express the speed[10] of one thing, say roundabout A but only in terms of some other thing, say roundabout B or the Earth itself.

While comparing the speed of ‘A’ to ‘B’ seems to leave us swimming in uncertainty, comparing it to the rotation of the Earth gives us a sense of solidness and reality. But we can see that this really is just another arbitrary comparison. We happen to choose the Earth as a reference just because we all happen to live on it and so it is very handy. We could choose to express speeds in terms of the rate mars, Venus or a fruit machine reel rotates.

So is all lost? Can we never really tell how fast something really is going, and what has all of this got to do with Time, or timelessness?

Well luckily Einstein has something to say here and it is that ‘the speed of light is constant’.

The logic, reasoning and deep importance of this statement is way beyond this book and this author to express but the basic reasoning is as follows.

In the universe around us we see no instantaneous movement or communication[11]. In other words nothing, no object or message appears to be able to cover a distance instantly. Everything has a finite speed.

Because nothing can travel at an infinite speed then logically there must be an upper speed limit in the universe. This makes sense because if there was no upper speed limit, then any speed you or I could achieve could be exceeded by someone or something else. And, this new record could of course be exceeded, and that speed exceeded and so on to infinite speed.

Given that there is a finite speed limit it seems that this speed is in fact the speed at which electromagnetic waves i.e. light, travels unhindered, or in a vacuum.

So Einstein says that the maximum speed in the universe is the speed of light, given as the symbol ‘C’. not only this, but because this is the maximum speed possible in the universe, the speed of light will appear to be the same to all observers no matter what their own apparent local speed seems to be.

The reasoning behind this stems from the observation that unless you can sense a change in your present circumstances, that is unless you can tell that you are being speeded up or slowed down, you cannot actually say how fast you are moving XXX trains etc

Again the logic and reasoning behind this covered in countless other books, and beyond the scope of this book

(NOTE TO PUBLISHER editor etc, a section briefly covering Galilean relativity can be added)

If you are unsure of or doubt the notion then you can research some of these volumes and have a go at disproving Einstein's arguments and the experimental proof behind them.

This changes everything, because suddenly instead of just having the arbitrary rotation of whatever planet we happen to live on to compare other speeds to we have a ‘fixed’ speed. a speed which it seems will be the same and makes sense to everyone on Earth and on any other planet in or beyond our solar system.

This speed of light ‘C’, is now similar to the speed of the child on the bike in our simple thought experiment.

If it turned out that the kid on the bike was travelling at a ‘universally fixed and defined unsurpassable speed’ then comparing any other speed (say the speeds of the roundabouts) to his speed is useful and makes sense. And in this way phoning our friends and telling them information about the rate that either roundabout is spinning compared to the speed of the kid on the bike (i.e. the speed of light) is not just adding another useless relative speed, but giving them a comparison to a speed that makes sense and is the same everywhere in the universe, and so extremely practical, useful and unambiguous.

The 'speed of light' is 'the speed of light'.

We may briefly feel there is an error here. If it is wrong, or rather useless, to say the Earth rotates once a day, and a day is the Time it takes the Earth to rotate once, then surely saying the speed of light is the speed of light is equally useless.

But this is not the case because while the speed at which any particular planet rotates is not only the result of billions of incalculable collisions and velocities (and also variable) the speed of light depends on two fundamental forces of nature in the universe namely electricity and magnetism[12] and being a result of the interaction between these fundamental forces means the speed of light[13] is not dependent on any extra or external influences.

>> ∆ 3 How far to the Moon.

Back to >> ∆ Timeless v.Time distinctions (Rhetoric and Semantics).

[1] It is in fact here that we make the critical error that means everything that follows is incorrect. What we have observed is that distance exists and that motion exists. (not that distance and Time exist).

[2] From here on referring to the clock hand means we are talking about the movement of the ‘tip’ of the hand.

[3] Such a clock might look unusual to most people but the essential ingredient of any clock is that its components move at a steady rate and this movement can be read and noted easily.

[4] Or rather are shown to have never been real in the first place.

[5] In fact the French telephone network actually uses similar rapidly rotating masses on magnetic bearing to store and provide emergency backup power.

[6] From here on ‘A’ or ‘B’ refers to ‘Roundabout A’ or ‘Roundabout B’.

[7] As far as I am aware.

[8] If you take apart a simple mechanical speedometer, the kind you find in a basic car you will find it has one disc driven by the rotation of the cars road wheels driving the speedometers needle via a kind of constantly slipping clutch mechanism. In this way the faster the driven disc rotates the more it constantly drives the needle to fight against a return spring, round the numbered display. So this mechanism doesn’t measure and count complete revolutions of the cars wheel then make calculations.

[9] it is a very useful number mathematically because 24 can be divided by 12, 6, 4, 3 and 2 very easily

[10] Note here we are comparing rotational speeds for convenience, but if you ‘Time’ any other event you are still comparing it to the rotational speed of the Earth just using terms like hours and minutes instead of ‘degrees’.

[11] We sidestep the seeming possible but equally apparently unusable concept of sending information by quantum entanglement here for now.

[12] These can in fact be seen to be different aspects or manifestations of a single phenomena.

[13] The speed of light essentially being ‘Einstein's constant ‘C’.