🚀 go-pugleaf

I am holding in my hand a baloney sandwich. I hereby declare that this
is an instance of a clock. Now I note that as the baloney sandwich
decreases, so does my hunger. Since time is what a clock measures, I
deduce that: Time is hunger.

In short, this definition of time is a load of baloney. Time is NOT what
you measure with a clock. Time is the length of timelike worldlines. Its
definition has nothing to do with the way you happen to measure it, whic
h is a mere technological bagatelle.



: 
: Philosophically, this is the viewpoint that once you have something defined,
: (such as a way to measure it, for example) it has *some sort* of reality.
: 
: When you define a 'clock', you are defining 'time'.  There are lots of way
: to build clocks, and an 'ideal' one may be an abstraction as opposed to
: any particular implementation, but those are the breaks.  We'll just have
: to say that people have some idea of 'clockness', and that we can build
: clocks that people generally agree are pretty good ones  nowadays (rubidium
: or cesium standards, for example).  People agree that grandfather clocks
: with weights aren't really so good - they can be affected by the environment
: in ways that 'better' clocks are not.
: 
: Anyway, the idea of time as something that is measured by a clock clears up
: some of the problems many people have with relativity.
: 
: All one has to do is to realize that what a clock measures depends on how
: it moves.  This is counter to practical every-day experience, where one
: expects _ideal_ clocks to stay synchronized no matter how they move around. 
: However, at sufficiently high velocities (and/or gravitational fields), this
: difference becomes measurable even for a 'perfect' clock.  (I'm not sure
: exatly what practical confirmatory evidence is availble, but I know there is
: at least some, - i.e. from particles that wouldn't be expected to live long
: enough to penetrate the atmosphere otherwise, but are observed to do so in
: practice).
: 
: This leads right to the idea of the 'relativity of simultanaeity'.  If
: the time elapsed on a clock depends on how it moves, you can no longer
: synchronize distant clocks simply by moving them together - you'd have
: to specify _how_ they were moved together.  Before relativity, one could
: assume clocks would always stay synchronized no matter what - after
: relativity, one no longer has this view.
: 
: Similar things happen with fields as far as 'reality' goes. In principle,
: there is a way to measure an electric field, for instance (the acceleration
: of a unit charge), though I'm not aware of any practical absolute methods
: (more practical ones measure changes in electric fields).  In this sense, a
: field is 'real'.
: 
: Fields also turn out to be a useful way to look at reality, (at least IMO)
: but that's another issue.