Thursday, September 13, 2007

Consider This: Infinate Time

Take a minute. No, I literally mean take a minute. As we understand time, it is a unit for a duration of time. The minute is divided up into seconds. There are sixty of them each describing a duration of time. There are a thousand milliseconds in each of those seconds. There are a million microseconds and a billion nanoseconds and so on. You understand.




Now consider that our minute can be stretched out to longer and longer durations. Its smaller components are stretched proportionally. First stretch it by a factor of two. Now our minute has double the duration. Its components and their components have double their original duration as well.



Now what if we stretch out the minute to cover an infinite duration? I realize the paradoxical implication with factoring by infinity, so please suspend your intellectual scepticism for a moment. If that minute were infinite in duration, the seconds would also be infinite. And so would the microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, etcetera. The very quanta of time, the smallest devisions time can be quantised into, would be infinately long.

Herein lies the paradox. Nothing can traverse an infinate distance or duration. Therefore, by stretching our minute to an infinate duration, we've effectively done away with time altogether. For an infinate amount of time is not time at all. Not zero time, it is no longer time at all. This is not to say that there couldn't simbly be an infinate number of minutes.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Sometimes I lie in bed and get the feeling that the universe is slowing down and one second is about to last an eternity. Sometimes people tell me they're glad I don't take drugs because I'm weird enough.

sometimes

Jordan Munroe said...

Drugs. Huh, I hadn't thought about it from that angle before. :-D