[The Black Lion]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Jack,

Would you care to explain your position (or is it Einstein’s position?) in your own words, as you understand it, so that those of us who are unfamiliar with the particular terminology used in those wikipedia links can completely comprehend your position on the subject?

Time, like space, is changed by physical conditions like gravity. This is not a philosophical assertion but a well-established experimental fact.

Correct me if I've misinterpreted your position, but when you refer to time are you not in actuality referring to gravity's effect on the speed in which physics operates. In other words, gravity effects the rate at which other energies (i.e. matter) operates in a particular portion of space. And therefore varying gravitation potentialities in differing points in space will warp the perception of material flux depending on which point in space a subject is perceiving external phenomenon?

In which case you are assigning the category of past to pockets of space that exist in this very moment, but in which the properties of physics are operating at slower speeds than the pocket of space you presently occupy? If that is the case then you are arguing semantics.

In order that we may clear the air, instead of spreading one theory on top of another perhaps you should first explain the faults in my own theory first as I do not see how Einstein's theory supports the notion of the past or future being physically tangible realities that are distinct and separate from the present moment while at the same time being composed of the exact same material as the present moment.

Therefore time is a property of the universe. The universe is not made of matter; it is made of spacetime, which can be described by the equations of general relativity. Your assertion that "time is illusory" is inconsistent with real-world physics.

I defined matter as all perceivable phenomenon within the physical reality. I included gravity, frequencies, photons, atoms, etc., all of which being differing manifestations of a primordial material stuff. Therefore, everything that can be known physically is composed of matter to include what you would call "space-time".

You will need to present a more detailed explanation in plain English. I do not comprehend where you can come to the conclusion that real-world physics is contradicted by the notion that the past, or future for that matter, do not constitute a distinct and tangible reality of their own which is composed of infinite copies of the exact same material comprises the present moment. (i.e. there are an infinite amount of versions of One-eyed Jacks to account for every material configuration that One-eyed Jack has ever held.)

While your post is thoughtful, what you are describing has no physical significance with respect to time travel. What you are describing is the human mental inability to perceive time on the same footing as we perceive the three spatial dimensions.

What I am stating is that there are not infinite versions of every configuration of matter that matter has ever been configured in existing at this very moment that is a tangible reality in and of itself that we, in this very moment, can physically traverse (or reverse) to. The issue of human mental inability is irrelevant. In fact, it is the human mental ability to remember that constitutes the illusion of time, not an inability.

If we take an atom, for instance, we find that the electrons are constantly in motion, not to mention their smaller components. Now let us consider every atom in existence. With that concept in mind, in order for the past to exist as a tangible reality distinct from this very moment, there would have to be countless tangible realities to account for every single point in "time" that all electrons held in space at any given moment.

Another way to look at it is as follows. If you drive to work in the morning you would be stating that you still exist at home in bed at the same moment that you are at work. Not to mention you are also still in your mother's womb at this present moment. Even in this case the past must exist now, in this moment, rendering the conotation of past a mute statement. Your position, if this is in fact your position, sounds more like an argument for a dimensional theory and not a time related past-present-future theory.

The past exists as certainly and as physically as Red Hook, New Jersey exists. We just can't get from here to the past without distorting spacetime in very difficult ways.

So the past's physical existence at this very moment is as certain as the physical existence of the present moment despite the fact that you have never physically been to this tangible past and can't get there? Interesting position.

Are you sure you are not referring to some kind of dimensional theory?

[One-eyed Jack]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Black Lion: "Would you care to explain your position (or is it Einstein’s position?) in your own words, as you understand it, so that those of us who are unfamiliar with the particular terminology used in those wikipedia links can completely comprehend your position on the subject?"

Oh bloody hell. Explain general relativity in a way everyone without experience in physics can understand, and do it in a forum post of a few hundred words. Yeah, sure, piece of cake.

(Stop laughing, Ahimaaz Smith.)

You should realize that the book I mentioned earlier, Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, takes 120+ pages to explain in layman's terms the basics of how gravity and energy bend spacetime, and a more complete exploration of relativity -- the topic of the book -- requires 500+ pages.

Read the book.

----

The Universe is spacetime. There are three dimensions of space. These are usually expressed as X, Y, and Z. There is one dimension of time, usually expressed as T. So we live in a four-dimensional universe: X, Y, Z, and T.

If you drive 3.5 kilometers in some direction and take 20 minutes to do it, then you have moved from coordinates X1, Y1, Z1, T1 to the coordinates X2, Y2, Z2, T2. You can move two ways in any spatial dimension: left or right in the X dimension, up or down in the Y dimension, or back or forth in the Z dimension. That is, you can change your spatial position by a positive or negative amount.

But in doing so you have not created a separate reality. You have simply changed your spacetime position in the Universe. (A Universe, you remember, that is made of spacetime.)

Now, ignoring any constraints such as the speed of light, you could change your position in space and time in any direction. You can move -4 meters in the X direction, 3 meters in the Y direction, 2 meters in the Z direction, and -5 hours in the T direction.

That would correspond not only to moving in space, but also to moving five hours into the past because the change is T coordinates is negative.

And that is simply a way of saying that Einstein's description of spacetime treats time as a real dimension. It is not a separate reality. It is simply part of the Universe -- a Universe that is made of spacetime.

However, there ARE constraints on movement: specifically, nothing can travel through spacetime faster than the speed of light. Mathematically, it turns out that this means that travel through spacetime can only proceed in a positive direction. You cannot travel through spacetime into the past.

(That through becomes important later on.)

Einstein's description of spacetime shows that this four-dimensional metric can be bent. The space dimensions bend, and so does the time dimension. The presence of matter or energy can do it. (Note: matter in this case is not "everything", as you defined it, but matter as the term is used in physics.)

To reiterate: you cannot travel through spacetime in a direction of -T; you cannot travel through spacetime backwards in the time direction. That would violate the laws of physics.

But it IS conceivable that you could bend a section of spacetime itself into a loop-like structure that bridges around and connects to a time the past. In 1987 the physicist Kip Thorne and his collaborators worked on the physics of such a "wormhole" used as a time machine. He found that:

"...[Time] hooks up to itself differently thorugh the wormhole than through the external Universe. ... And this difference of hookup, I then realized, implies that from a single wormhole, an infinitely advanced civilization can make a time machine."
(From Black Holes and Time Warps, page 502, emphasis in the original.)

In this case the traveler never travels through spacetime in a backwards direction: he uses a sort of loop which, when traveled in a conventional positive-T direction, connects to an X, Y, Z, T coordinate that is in the past.

When Thorne and his collaborators investigated the details of matter and energy associated with such a wormhole, however, it appeared likely that such a wormhole is unstable and will be destroyed almost instantly. It may be that if a certain kind of exotic matter can be included in the wormhole construction that these instabilities would not destroy it, and a time machine would be possible. But that is not clear.

For the purposes of our discussion the take-home lesson is this:

Time is not illusory, the past and future are not separate realities.

The past and future are places in the Universe of spacetime, a Universe made of spacetime. They are places described by X, Y, Z, and T coordinates and which -- given the proper means of travel -- you could really visit.

Another good book on this is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

----

What follows are my own opinions, though somewhat based on thermodynamics and other aspects physical science.

Humans cannot visualize spacetime curvature in four dimensions. They also have a lot of trouble understanding how the past can be "real", because without the wormholes of an infinitely advanced civilization we cannot go there.

And, perhaps most importantly, we cannot see time properly because we are entropic beings whose mental processes are embedded in electro-chemical reactions governed by the flow of time and by "time's arrow" -- the somewhat mysterious distinction which determines that a chemical reaction like the burning of a newspaper only ever proceeds from paper to ash, and never ever from ash to paper.

Our brains only ever "burn" electrochemically in one direction, and we are congenitally unable to perceive the dimension of time in the same way we perceive the three dimensions of space. We can't directly perceive quantum indeterminacy, either, or the fluctuations of the vacuum, but that doesn't mean they are not real things in the real Universe. And in fact, by using certain measuring devices we can demonstrate that they DO exist.

In the individual, naive view (essentially the view of the classical Greeks) the only thing we can use for the purpose of perception is our own mind. The novelist Cormac McCarthy had one of his characters say, "It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind 'cause his mind is aught he has to know it with." Similarly, time is a mystery to the naive individual because his mind is a process dependent on the entropic "arrow" -- his thoughts are dependent on processes which cannot stand still and cannot be reversed.

However, given the proper tools -- in this case, physics -- we can at least understand in an abstract way that the Universe includes all of space and also all of time as well. No need for separate realities. No need for duplicate particles. Everything simply changes position in spacetime: in the X, Y, Z, and T directions.

That is all.

----

Almighty God sits on His throne outside the Universe. Spacetime to Him is as plain and physically real as the sauerkraut he had on his reuben sandwich at lunch. He sticks His Mighty Finger into the spacetime Universe He created. There are a couple of Nephilim trying to get naughty with one of the daughters of Shem, and with a flick of His Finger he cracks the Nephilim right in their dongly-bits. Yelping, the Nephilim run off. God reaches into another location in spacetime and causes King Jehoram's guts to fall out of his bottom.

Sigh. So boring....

He causes the Pope to have Cardinal Jiminez expand the Spanish Inquisition, causes a tortilla in 21st-century America to display an image of the Virgin Mary, and makes two neutron stars crash into each other in what would be the Christian year 3039 if there were any Christians not already in heaven at that time.

"What a bore to be able to see every event omnisciently," God thinks. "No surprises."

He decides to have an archangel fetch him some ice-cream. It's going to be a long eternity.

~~ OEJ

[The Black Lion]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Jack,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I still do not comprehend WHY the notion of time has been interjected into the equation. I guess what I am asking is, what is it exactly that motivated these physicist to include time? I understand the rationale of up, down, left, right, forward, backwards, and every coordinate configuration inbetween. Those realities are clearly observed. But the concept of time seems to be thrown in without any clear reason. It seems no different than saying God exists just because. Help me out here.

While we're on the subject, how exactly does one measure time in the present moment? Surely there has to be something more than a clock because by my hypothesis a clock, like all other matter, is merely in motion at this present moment.

I still can't help but wonder if we are arguing over semantics. So answer me this following question,

Yes or No: Are you postulating that if you drive to work in the morning at 7am, that you, at home in bed still sleeping at 3am is just as real at the same time as you being at work seeing that the past exists tangibly in your view?

[Ezekiel Bathfire]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

when you refer to time a... blah...blah...blah

I once had the unfortunate experience of sitting next to a Buddhist monk on a flight to Damascus.

He spouted on about the ineffability of time. He went on and on and on and on.

All I wanted to do is sleep and here was a yellow robed uneducated peasant, steeped in ignorance from a third world country, keeping me awake.

The man had the temerity to follow me into customs at Damascus Airport and continue to pronounce as we retrieved out baggage and made our way to the taxi rank.

There, as I pushed him aside for a taxi, I told him that for all the ineffability of time, he had managed to catch the plane and steal 4 hours of my life from me.

That is what time is upon God's earth - days and nights divided up neatly.

Are you the hand-servant of some fat, bald Indian chap under a Bo tree or worse still, a Hindoo set on worshipping some 6-legged blue elephant with a baboon's ass?

Show your colors and we'll tell you where you went wrong.

[Ezekiel Bathfire]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Jack,I still do not comprehend WHY the notion of time has been interjected into the equation.

Only a wild guess, but I did notice the title of the thread...

[Pastor Al E Pistle]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Before JESUS corrected me I was in John Walker's physics postgrad program at UT/Austin. After a couple of years it became clear to me that Professor Walker was SATAN'S meat-puppet and I left that program as fast as I could return the books, most of which were written by JOOZ who didn't have idea one about God's motives because someone cut off their brainstem when they were babies.

After I switched to a more mainstream college, Landover University...when it was just becoming mainstream....I began to see all the beauty GOD created while Professor Leary was my counselor, by simply reading the bible and eating sugarless candy.

I advise all of you multi-verse-string theory-13 dimension nutcakes to stop thinking and read the Bible. Absolutely NOTHING in the Bible says that anyone should think for themselves, and pretending the universe is just a XXXXXl chunk of panyhose that GOD pokes his fingers through is sick, sick, sick.

The economy of the world is crumbling! Swine flu and Avian flu are loose in MOOhammadistan and Iran has almost enough Plutonium to nuke Israel. We have almost no oil or water left, yet people still try to think for themselves! GET A GUN AND GET READY TO FOLLOW JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS TO KILL THE ISLAMABOYZ!

Your pal
Pastor Al

[One-eyed Jack]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Black Lion: " I still do not comprehend WHY the notion of time has been interjected into the equation."

Well, probably because you can't even use physics to describe the path of a falling pineapple without putting time into the equation. The equations don't work in the real world if you take time out.

Even Galileo put time into his equations, back in 1638. The math he came up with, Galilean transformations, were similar to the Lorentz transformations but didn't work so good in accelerated frames. From that sump of iniquity, Wickedpedia:

"Galileo formulated these concepts in his description of uniform motion. The topic was motivated by Galileo's description of the motion of a ball rolling down a ramp, by which he measured the numerical value for the acceleration of gravity at the surface of the Earth."

I am gonna have to pray over you. I just don't see no way to get around it.

O LORD! Heave a steaming wad of mercy and wisdom at this here Black Lion fella. GUIDE his contrary and stubborn brain-goo into the ways of the RIGHTEOUS and let him FORGET what little science (falsely so-called!) has managed to seep its way past the consolidated hardpan of his skullbones.

I am begging You, Jesus, if this here Black Lion sinner don't REPENT HIS EVIL WAYS then use Your miraculous powers to hurl his web browser straight over to Phil Plait's science forum and let him go to PERDITION asking his questions on a science board instead of pestering us Godly folk. SALVATION is not of PHYSICS! Galileo was a heretic, not a Baptist! Science is not wisdom...FEAR is the beginning of wisdom!

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever. Psalm 11:10

I hope and pray and entreat and supine that Black Lion will FEAR the Lord! I just pray that a bolt of pure Godly fear knocks him right out of his galoshes and singes his underpants and sends him scurrying for the nearest Baptist church to get his evil self baptized into the LOVE of LORD JESUS!

Amen.

I don't know how the heck I got myself suckered into trying to answer questions about physics on the Lord's time. Christ Himself knows I've suffered enough in my woeful days upon this here orb of grief.

~~ OEJ

[Pastor Billy-Reuben]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

We have almost no oil or water left, yet people still try to think for themselves! GET A GUN AND GET READY TO FOLLOW JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS TO KILL THE ISLAMABOYZ!

Amen, Pastor! What is the point of all this mental Onanism? The tribulation is about to start! Nobody cares about quantum physics when their body is covered in boils and their kids are starving.

Pastor Billy-Reuben

[The Black Lion]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

Black Lion: " I still do not comprehend WHY the notion of time has been interjected into the equation."

Well, probably because you can't even use physics to describe the path of a falling pineapple without putting time into the equation. The equations don't work in the real world if you take time out.

There is a difference between a unit of measurement (i.e. hours, minutes, seconds) and a tangible seperate reality, divisible from the present moment, where the apple exists eternally in mid descent at a specific point in the past. You would be implying that people in the present moment can step out of this present moment and into another past moment while the present moment still exists, but elsewhere (in the future at that point). I think you have watched too much Star Trek.

I do believe this is a matter of semantics. You seem to be arguing a case for somethng completely different than that which I am arguing against. Otherwise, I sincerely hope you don't honestly believe men can travel back in time if they slingshot themselves around the Sun at speeds greater than light.

[One-eyed Jack]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

The Lord loveth not the proud man, the man who searcheth not for wisdom, but instead trusteth only in the thoughts of his own single mind. If you want to address time travel sensibly you'd better do some reading. That's all I've got to say.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

In the days of the Patriarchs giants walked the Earth in the form of man. Strange beings on the road, meteoric creatures fallen from Heaven. Their pale eyes filled with lost light. The Emims, men called them. The Zamzummims. The Anakims.

They came unto the daughters of men. Unholy unions! Worse far than the AFL-CIO. Silent they were in their rapture, unspeaking and unspeakable, and over their carnal labors the falling-stars came rifling down the heavens leaving trails of green and violet that faded slowly like final dying hopes.

Strange birthings followed. Tall children with yellow eyes, children drawn to fire, drawn to war. To gold and onyx and beryl. To idolatry. To whoredoms and defilements.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. Genesis 6:5-7

Then the Flood: a gathering of the waters and a convocation of the seas. Mighty cities lay drowned and lightless a hundred leagues beneath the stormwaves. The bodies of the Anakim, the Emim, the Zamzummim drifted in the depths, yellow eyes sightless, provender for the fishes and the crabs.

So began the second age. In the fullness of time the spirit and style of Cormac would infest the keyboards of the righteous, and grievous would be the prose produced thereby! For a pastiche is a pastiche, and no right thing; and what is borrowed will fall before the scythe of time like the barleyfields fall before the reapers. And boy oh boy will it be silly.

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten. Joel 1:4

~~ OEJ

[Ahimaaz Smith]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

BL,

Here's my response. I removed the italics and boldface, because, frankly, they are evidence of a seriously deranged mind. All the paranoid schizophrenics who come to our forums use odd fonts, then they start saying HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!. I do hope you are not a HAHAHAHAHA!!!! guy, but I know that something is wrong with you upstairs, so I will pray for you.

You misunderstand my position. I am not stating that the laws of physics do not exist. I do not state that matter does not exists nor do I state that matter does not interact with matter. My position is that the shapes and forms that matter takes within the physical reality are temporary configurations that I classify as illusionary because they can change or un-become at any moment, in the context of an Objective Truth. An Objective Truth being something that is and forever will be.

So, to refute the existence of time, you introduce the concept of "forever." How very, very clever. NOT.

For instance, if you point to a mass of material designated as an oak chair and state that it is an oak chair I can disagree with you.

Not surprising. I point to God's Word and state that it is God's Word, and you dispute that, too. You are simply disagreeable.

All I would have to do is toss that material into a fire or smash it into pieces.

You could toss a Bible into the fire, but still God's Word would remain unchanged.

At that point it is no longer a chair. The oak chair exists as an Objective Truth only in concept, but not materially.

You're the idiot who threw it in the fire, not me. Anyway, you go through all of this nonsense to prove that time doesn't exist, and yet you persist in saying things like "is no longer." And why does "Objective Truth" get capitalized. Only people in Ayn Rand's cult obsessively capitalize "Objective." You aren't a Rand cultist, are you?

The designation of matter as a "chair" is a product of the subjective conditioning of our ego.

Funny how every time I try to sit on a leopard, it turns out badly. If only my ego's subjective conditioning had been more astute!

I could also designate it as club and beat people with it.

Gee, what a shock, in addition to your various delusions, you also have latent maniacal tendencies.

The concept of "past" is based solely in memory. The past is not a tangible reality.

So if a pitcher throws a strike, we really shouldn't attribute the ball crossing the plate to the pitcher, since there is no tangible reality of any pitcher involved? If so, isn't it amazing how, every time I see a strike thrown, there just happens to be a pitcher standing about 60 feet away. He must feel pretty stupid standing all by his lonesome when everyone else on the field is playing the game.

The material that composed an oak chair can be recycled, per say, and come to incorporate the physical form of a leopard, yes. However, it is not time that dictates change from a seemingly inanimate object to a biological organism. It is the deformation and subsequent reformation of matter in this constant moment.

And you use phrases like "constant moment." If time doesn't exist, you hardly need to define any moment as a constant moment, since there is only one moment. For that matter, there's no need to use the word "moment," since there is only one. Ditto for "come to," too, another concept that is meaningless if time does not exist.

Your psyche stores impressions related to the previous material configurations you have sensually experienced.

Really? Thank you for enlightening me, I never understood what all that memory stuff was all about.

We call these stored impressions memories.

My, you are just a treasure trove of trivia. Have you ever considered writing a dictionary?

However, the previous configuration of said material does not exist as a distinctly separate entity from that very same material in the present moment.

Man, you keep bowling me over with your profundity. Here I was, thinking, when a chair transforms into a leopard, the leopard is made of entirely new material, yet you seem to be saying that the atoms in said chair survive even if they no longer maintain the same bonding relations, into said leopard. Of course, if they're the same atoms, instead of different atoms, you need to address one important question--if not time, then exactly what does separate the chair configuration and the leopard configuration? Note that "previous" is meaningless if time does not exist. As is "present moment." And said (if time doesn't exist, than how can anything be "said?" It's just "saying" or nothing at all.)

In order for time to exist the oak chair must still exist despite the leopard.

WTF are you talking about? There was a chair. It no longer exists. It is now a leopard. The chair is gone. No matter how maniacal you are, you can no longer hit people with that chair. The best you can do is to hit people with the leopard, and, having tried that once, I can't recommend it.

A point in time would require a tangible reality distinct from the present moment in order that a person could travel to it.

Two tangible realities for you: (a) here's a chair and (b) here's a leopard.

Furthermore, there must be an indefinite amount of copies of that chair in order to account for every single moment in time from the formation of the chair to its deformation.

That's like saying there must be an infinite number of cars for every single place that occurs as the car moves along the road. Two problems there: (1) if there's a car at X, and then in an instant the car is at X plus 1 millimeter, why doesn't the old car crash with the new car, and (2) you are taking a very simple model and adding huge complexities without adducing any evidence whatsoever to support it.

Are you postulating that matter and time are one and the same?

I'm not postulating anything. I'm just saying that you start with ridiculous premises and use flawed logic to arrive at an absurd and untestible conclusion. Since I can't measure time with a bathroom scale, and I can't measure matter with a clock, I guess I'd fall out on the side that time isn't the same as matter.

In which case, in order to move backwards in this co-called time-matter, the entire spectrum of material reality would have to simultaneously revert to an earlier stage.

Now you use two more concepts that are meaningless if time is an illusion, "simultaneous" and "revert," to try to prove that time does not exist. Anyway, since I don't think matter and time are the same, I don't really need to worry about this particular thread of illogic in the tapestry of illogic that you have woven.

One individual object could not revert to a previous state without simultaneously drawing everything else around it into a past state with it in a domino effect.

I never said that anything reverts. I say that it just was. Even if it does revert, then why wouldn't you assume that everything else reverts, too, rather than blaming one individual object (i.e., the chair cum leopard) for the whole mess?

This is because its previous material configuration, material composition, and even the previous environments in which it existed would constitute matter that in the present moment is incorporated into different configurations.

Let me get this straight, because it is an important point. You are saying that, if a chair was in a room with a fire at a particular date in, say, 1980, if I were to go back in time to that same date and sit in the chair, there would be a fire! Who ever would have thought that the past would be exactly like the past???

To reach the identical previous state in time-matter would require the previous identical matter. Recall that matter is in constant flux.

Frankly, I think you're mind is in a constant flux. You come in here with half baked ideas that are either illogical, simplistic, or untestable, and in most cases all three, and you expect us to pay serious attention to them.

Your modus operandi is to pin your arguments on adverbs that you use but don't define, citing your failure to provide a definition as "proof" that the qualities that the adverbs imply don't exist. Well, my friend, that is tangibly, currently, physically, entirely, distinctly stupid. And that is the Objective Truth. Throwing adjectives around is not the same as proving your point (and my proof for that proposition is you). This is the kind of argument that would get an "F" in any high school philosophy class. At least Unfalsifyable tries to spin a logical argument, you're just out there on your own.

[Ahimaaz Smith]

Re: What do you Bible humpers think about time-travel??

There is a difference between a unit of measurement (i.e. hours, minutes, seconds) and a tangible seperate reality, divisible from the present moment, where the apple exists eternally in mid descent at a specific point in the past.

OMG! Units of measurement are not the same as the thing that they measure? Damn, why didn't anyone tell me that before?

You would be implying that people in the present moment can step out of this present moment and into another past moment while the present moment still exists, but elsewhere (in the future at that point). I think you have watched too much Star Trek.

Have you bothered to read what Brother OEJ said at all? Stupid question, the answer is obviously no. For the life of me, I can't figure out what the Hell you mean by stepping into a past moment while the present moment still exists. The present moment can hardly exist "while" the past moment exists, otherwise it would be the same moment. Can you even try not to use terms that describe temporal relations in your proofs that time does not exist?

I do believe this is a matter of semantics. You seem to be arguing a case for somethng completely different than that which I am arguing against.

If it's something completely different, then it's not a matter of semantics at all, is it? It's a matter of substance. Not that I'd expect you to know the difference.

Otherwise, I sincerely hope you don't honestly believe men can travel back in time if they slingshot themselves around the Sun at speeds greater than light.

Wow, talk about setting up straw men. You can't win an argument with Brother OEJ, so you put words into his mouth that are both completely unrelated to anything that he said and almost as illogical as the position you support. If you're going to criticize, please criticize what we say, not what you saw on some third-rate sci-fi TV show.