If there is a clock in the woods and there is no one there to hear it tick, does time pass?
(Corollary question: if there is a clock in the woods and no one is there to hear it tick, do the trees age? Are naturalists killing trees by going camping?)
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Here a radical old response,
to a more radical question …
“If there is no other,
there will be no I.
If there is no I,
there will be none
to make distinctions.
-Chuang-tsu, 4th Cent. B.C.
[Fung Yu-lan, Chuang-tzu,
A new selected translation,
Shanghai, The Commercial Press, 1933.
Quoted by Alan Watts
in The Watercourse Way, Pantheon Books,
New York, 1975, p.52.]
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Time is a purely statistical phenomenon anyway…
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Time isn’t an observable anyway.
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If time is a statistical phenomenon, why aren’t there fluctuations in which I’m actually on time for a change?
And if time isn’t an observable, then are clockmakers the biggest frauds of all time?
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Oh, yes, many clockmakers are frauds. I had a fellow tell me his mechanical clock could maintain accuracy to within less than 10 seconds per month (over the long term it was supposedly better than quartz). Who needs that kind of accuracy?
Besides, that’s just coordinate time anyway…
As for time being statistical, it only matters to us because we’re an aggregate (an enormous aggregate) of subatomic particles.
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I only mean that there is no time operator in QM. You know the approximate Hamiltonian under which the position of the clock hands evolve, and then infer the time from a measurement of their position.
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Heh, yeah I know Joe. I was just being a smarty-pants. I need to add smarty-pants tags to some of my comment
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When I read your comment I had a sudden bout of self doubt, and thought there must have been some double meaning to what I had said.
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If a clock ticks in the forrest, and there is no one to hear it… is there a tree?
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