ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Monte Davis]

> So based on this, Monte, could you give your working 
> definition of time? 
> (this is a deadpan serious question).

I was deadpan serious in saying that I only know what it isn't: namely,
nearly all the ways we nearly always think of it. 

And I don't know of any way out of that fly-bottle except through stances of
mysticism and gestures -- very very serious gestures -- of art, AtD very
much a case in point.

Take away memory, the sense of continuity through time, and where's your
identity, your consciousness? As soon as you really think about about any of
the language of "extension" applied to time, it falls apart -- yet we can't
do, maybe can't be, without it.

Maybe the only scientific point essential to grappling with AtD is that for
a ray (beam, wave, photon) of light,*there is no time.* In your reference
frame you say it "takes a year" to get from point A to point B a light-year
away; in its own reference frame, that year -- and the every other year from
the Big Bang to whatever the end may be -- is one instant. Not one instant
of many -- the only one.