Sunday, January 17, 2010

Time 4

100th post!!!!

If you hadn’t noticed, the pop physics excerpt played in with our current theme, time. Now we’ll take a more fundamental look at it. What is time? According to Wikipedia,

Time is part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects.

The first definition (of 19) that Merriam-Webster is the same as Wikipedia’s. In other words it’s a really really hard thing to define. If I were to be asked to give a definition of it I would be a smart-ass and something like time is velocity times distance. But of course I can’t do that because in physics time is considered a fundamental unit from which we derive all other units, such as force or speed. Physics has 7 fundamental units: kilogram, meter, candela, second, ampere, kelvin, and mole. These correspond to mass, length, luminosity, time, current, temperature and a specific (6.22X10^23) number of atoms/molecules of something. All other units and quantities in physics can be broken down into a combination of these units.

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