Then why did he spell out that his entire interest was theological?
Because he is posting on a theology forum. The topic is not irrelevant to theology nor is his theology irrelevant to his motive for presenting the information on a theology forum but his doctrine, whether it is a motivating factor or not, is not relevant to the veracity of the arguments he made. Rejecting his arguments on the basis of his doctrine is not a rational reason for rejecting the arguments because he did not make his doctrine a premise of his argument!
Now, that's the last I'm saying on the topic. You either get it or you're stupid. Either way, any further discussion on this issue is a waste of my time.
Already done, but you haven't the wit to appreciate the argument.
Says the half wit who can't figure out that someone's motive for making an argument isn't part of the argument itself.
I'll try to use shorter words, Clete.
Don't strain yourself.
He and you assume that if one clock has experienced more time elapsed between events, then it will have moved into the future and left the present. This is presented as the key observation.
Nope. We make no such assumption. You're too dense to understand that the present is just one point in time, one tick on a clock, the tick that everything that exists arrives at together. No matter how slow or fast you claim something is moving through time it manages somehow to perfectly tie everything else in a race to the present moment.
Notwithstanding that if you thought that the clock had moved further into the future then it must have passed through the present and therefore be visible in the present, this is a big assumption and representative of the foundational belief in absolute time, which is why you find that Relativity is not compatible with absolute time conceptions. Funnily enough, it is not meant to be.
You cannot refute my argument by presupposing the validity of your own. I know you won't understand how you are doing that here and I'm not willing to explain it.
Further, I happen to think that time is not absolute, at least not in the sense you probably think Bob means it. Time does not exist except as an idea. It is not a fundamental property of nature, it's merely a convention of language that we use to convey information about the duration and sequences of events relative to other events. The only sense in which time is absolute is in the fact that events happen in the order in which they happen and in no other order.
Here it is: experiment finds that ALL time dependent processes experience EXACTLY the same time dilation as the 'slower' clock measures: chemical reactions take longer, nuclear decays take longer, clocks run slower, the half lives of unstable particles seem to be longer, electrical signals take longer, EVERYTHING that has been observed is seen to experience the SAME time changes as the clock.
These are all clocks! A clock is nothing at all other than a regular set of arbitrary events that we use to compare other events too.
If you don't want to call that a change in the flow of 'time', then fine. But you have departed from the self-consistent conception that science has used for a very long time, and you now fail to have your own definition.
I (we) have given a very clear definition of time so many times that I'm about to joke! I've given it again in this very post. Your denial of it doesn't make it go away.
(Saying it is defined by the sunrises just means that you define time for all things with just the one 'clock', and then no equation that has time as a dependent variable will now work when gravity or speeds are different. Nothing.)
You do not even understand the argument. No wonder you can't refute it. As I've said seemingly a million times now, if you don't want to use sun rises then pick something else. You can use the number of orbits that occur for HM Cancri (a binary star system). Or keep track of the number of metric tons of meteors strike the Earth's atmosphere (assuming you have an accurate way of doing so.) Or whatever you want! The third clock, whatever it is will read the same for both the other two clocks so long as it is not affected by whatever it is effecting either of the other two clocks.
Put another way, all three clocks will arrive together at whatever point in the future you want to pick. Put a third way, pick any two points in time you want.
Put a third way, pick any two points in time you want (you'll be forced to use a clock of some sort to do this, it doesn't matter which one you choose). We'll call the earlier point in time the "start" and the later point the "finish". All three clocks in the experiment will both start and finish in perfect synchronicity.
Enyart assumes in ALL the discussion in the OP that there is but a single time line that everything moves along - this his assumption of absolute time.
No observation of anything else has ever occurred, nor could it occur because everything that exists, exists now and only now. Any event you want to name, if it occurred and was observed, the event and the observation occurred at the same time.
Please don't bring up something stupid like super-novas which we observe after the fact. The supernova happened at some point in the past. What we are observing is the light waves entering our eyes (or telescope or whatever it is we are using to make the observation.) The light wave hitting the instrument is what is being observed. In fact, the light hitting the instrument is the observation.
The comment that one clock will have gone further into the future absolutely reinforces that view.
No one has made any such claim. The future does not exist. You cannot refute arguments that you do not understand.
There is nothing in theory that prevents the time elapsed for two locations/objects to be different even though they can arrive in the same place in the same instant. To disagree means you have adopted absolute time, for which conclusive experimental evidence refutes.
Saying it doesn't make it so. You need to study something called "begging the question".
See ya!
Clete
