what is time? what the definition of time? what the concept of time
The concept of time continues to perplex both ordinary people and scientists, even philosophers. This article attempts to analyze the concept and definition of time from the perspectives of subjective time perception and objective time.
Subjective Time: Subjective time refers to the human perception of the frequency of changes in objects. This perception depends on factors such as the speed and acceleration of the observer's reference frame, the relative velocity to other frames, and the observer's state—analogous to the working state of a processor reading a display buffer and counting. For example, time dilation and length contraction in special relativity are purely differences in the observer's counting perception of the observed object. These differences arise from the dynamic variation in the light-path between the observer and the observed object, due to the non-additivity of light speed and the isotropy of space.
Objective Time: In the space-quantized model introduced on this website, time can be defined as the counting of state changes in quantized space. This counting may apply to the overall changes in the universe's space, localized spatial changes, or the spatial changes of a specific physical object. The speed of objective time depends on the frequency of spatial transformations. What determines this frequency? First, the fundamental quanta of space have a ground-state harmonic frequency, and energy transfer between these quanta occurs at a conduction frequency. According to general relativity, the distortion of space—changes in the metric—alters the harmonic frequency of objects, thereby affecting their time. An analogy would be a spring whose resonant frequency changes when a load is applied. I interpret gravitational time dilation and the equivalence principle in general relativity as describing this phenomenon.
If space is understood as a quantized elastic network, the state transitions of the entire or localized space correspond to the overall or local time scale. In this model, each spatial transformation can be associated with an entropy value (calculated multiplicatively from the structural matrix information of each transformation). Multiplicative entropy serves as an effective tool for characterizing quantum thermodynamics. Thus, a mapping is established between spatial transformations, entropy, and time, providing a clear and precise definition of the concept of time.
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