Time Measurement

Can time be measured without using at least two objects in relative motion?

Do atomic clocks count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock

No. There is motion; vibration.

Don't think so. In an atomic clock we're looking, as I understand it, at the average decay rate of a huge number of atoms. Thus, motion as the atoms decay.

Absolutely zero motion in a total void combines two impossibilities in one premise: zero degrees Kelvin and a perfect vacuum. An impossible premise is an argument from fallacy.

This is a thought experiment. Anything is possible in one's mind.

Fleas in a flea circus are trained by putting a lid on the container and allowing the fleas to jump as high as they could. After a while, they know exactly how high to jump and not hit the lid. Then you can remove the lid and they will not jump out, only as high as the lid used to be.

Do not put a lid on your imagination.

Imagine a world with no hypothetical situations.

A vacuum is a relative measurement of differentials. If there is a zero differential there can be no vacuum in the general sense. Absolute zero is when all molecules and atoms quit moving. A perfect void has no molecules or atoms or energy so temperature is irrelevant.

Yes! You have proffered a thought experiment on measuring time with an extreme limitation that can never exist. That is the initial fallacy you argue from.

I have one on my wrist a way to measure time without any mechanical moving parts. I am wearing a smart watch. The watch does have switches that allow me to interact with it. The marking of time happens with the use of several non-moving solid-state devices.

Within these sold state devices, electrons are moving.

As I said, this is a thought experiment.

Take the lid off of your imagination.

Don't be afraid of hitting the lid.

I saw a dog once that had been chained since he was a pup.

A circle of dirt about 10 feet radius surrounded him, no grass in that circle.

Then man finally removed the chain after someone complained, but the dog would not move out of the well worn circle.

Someone picked him up and put him outside of the circle to show him it was ok...but it was not. The dog shook all over with fear, and would not move or relax until he was put back inside his circle.

He lived the rest of his life in the circle without a chain, never leaving his comfort zone, even when a female in season was near.

He did mate though when a female entered his circle.

So sad.

Thought experiments allow one to wonder about impossible situations. Most of the impossible thought experiments negate a few rules. However, your premise of no motion, objects, quantum states, or energy negates the universe's existence. Thus, none of the observed rules of the universe apply to this premise. Every analysis of such a premise is simultaneously valid and invalid when no rules exist.

You are correct that electrons "move" in an electric circuit. Unless ions are created, no momentum change or motion happens to the parts of the circuit any more than the Brownian motion induced by temperature.

The nature of time fascinates you. The nature of time has fascinated philosophers and physicists for millennia. I still love the anonymous quote: “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.” (Sometimes, circular reasoning is the only option.) If you are willing to suffer a headache on the nature of time, there is a proposed quantum unit of time, the chronon.

The statement below is true.

The statement above is false.

____________________________________________________________________

Time has 3 dimensions, space is just a second effect.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-theory-dimensions-space-secondary-effect.html

The oldest confirmed use of any version of this quote that I was able to find is from Ray Cummings' short story The Time Professor, published in the Jan. 8, 1921 issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly (thanks to mgkrebbs for pointing this one out):

"I do know what time is," Tubby declared. He paused. "Time," he added slowly -- "time is what keeps everything from happening at once. I know that--I seen it in print too."

^{Pg. 371 - Emphasis mine - Ray Cummings - Google Books}

He used it again in his novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, published in 1922:

The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from happening at once."

^{Ch. 5 - Ray Cummings - Project Gutenberg - Public Domain}

This quote has been mistakenly attributed to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Woody Allen, John Archibald Wheeler, and likely others, in many different forms.

Yet you believe that quantum objects blink into existence and blink out with no explanation of the source, only speculation that they come from "Somewhere " and go back to "Somewhere" in pairs, and the pairs could be separated by billions of light years yet they are in synch? Kind of Spooky. And there also quantum computers that solve an equation without even running, only because they could be made to run.

Counterfactual computation:

https://news.illinois.edu/quantum-computer-solves-problem-without-running/

Imagine being in a room that is totally dark. No light source anywhere. Total darkness. No stimulus to any of your senses.

Now imagine this is your entire universe.

This is a void.

Not hard to imagine for me.

No, this is not a void, it is a large sensory deprivation tank.

And, whilst in this sensory deprived space, time marches on.

In either case, you will be unable to judge time; No references. If you were in that state for a few minutes, hours, or years you could not tell until you emerged into a environment of "things" and observe a calendar or clock.

The time outside of this environment of "things" will march on at a rate that is relative with the observer.

Einstein said the is no "Absolute" time. It is all relative to the observer.

But not to the person in the void. As AE said, time is relative to the observer. There is no Absolute Time.

You said

“Can time be measured without using at least two objects in relative motion?

“I don't think so therefor there has to be motion to measure time.

“It there is a total void, no matter, no quantum objects, no energy then there can be no time, IMHO.”

Is “… there can be no time…” (interpreted to mean time simply does not exist) the same thing as no method available to measure the passage of time?

I must admit, I do wonder how you get any sleep with all of these subject diverse and complex questions rattling around in your head; and I assume you only ask us the easy ones!

I was the kind of kid that always asked: "Why?"

"Just because" was not good enough for me. No internet or phones at the time, but there was a library within a days ride, so I spent a lot of time there. I would always get distracted by irrelevant but interesting information and off I would go on a tangent to different so called trivial subjects, but they were not trivial to me. I mentally filed them away for contemplating as I drifted off to sleep.

I don't sleep, I cat-nap.

Your brain is similar to my pet owl except it always asks "Who".

Hey, if it wasn't for his musings we wouldn't have anythink to think about any more.

Put a reference atom in old salt mine. Measure its frequency. Now you have time and a reference. Keeping track of that atom might be difficult with out some other equipment.

That is circular thinking. How do you measure frequency without already having a time reference? Besides, atoms are not stationary, and the OP question excludes any matter or energy.

I admit it is very difficult to imagine nothing because even our thoughts require energy and motion to function. That is why this is an imaginary situation, and imagination should be considered as infinite.

RE: very difficult to imagine nothing

This reminds me of something from one of the HHGG books by Douglas Adams.

Roughly paraphrased, it is “Space is big. REALLY big. Unimaginably huge multiplied by eye wateringly vast multiplied by mind numbingly large is the basic idea here.”

For ANY quantity, including time, inability to measure it does NOT prove that the quantity does not exist.

Prove your statement.

My understanding is that it is impossible to prove that anything does NOT exist.

Can you prove that?

In order for there to be a perception of time, you need an observer. Per your definition of the void, the observer will be outside the void, observing time in the void. That means that the time in the void will be perceived time, which is transmutable. Waiting for the work day to end in 60 minutes is an infinitely long time, while playing a game the same 60 minutes can feel like a flash. Or more realistically - wife: I will be ready in 5 minutes.

Yes, time perception will be observable, but pretty irrelevant.

AE said that time and space are relative and I think he was right.

Even so, reality is subjective..it has to be, because it is all in your mind.

Try to imagine the universe from a blind person's perspective, or a deaf person, or both, like Helen Keller.

Each person has a different universe because it is seen from a different perspective.

Einstein also said that "Reality is an illusion, but a very persistent one."

I like the wife comment!

I like the question. There are two directions to go with it. One is: "does time exist when there is no motion?" The other is: "can you measure time when there is no motion?" In both cases, I am considering any motion, atomic, subatomic, and nuclear decay, as motions.

On the measurement direction, all of our "measurements" of time are different forms of counting. Counting implies repeated action, which is basically motion. With current time measurement methods, my current answer is: no.

On the existance of time without motion, I have a few thoughts. To me, these are more interesting than measurement as the get to existance. Absolute zero temperature is the first place my mind goes when thinking about no motion. However, absolute zero is defined based on relatively large scale motions; the vibration of atoms. I don't think this definition implies that electrons stop 'orbiting' or that the exchange of quantum particles that drive the nuclear strong force ceases or that energy ceases to exist. We have a mechanism (refrigeration) to approach absolute zero temperature on a finite mass, but as the energy required to remove that remaining thermal energy approaches infinity achieving absolute zero is not possible. I don't know that we have mechanisms for removing energy from electrons or quarks. We can add energy to electrons by applying radiation, but the mechanism for shedding energy is the instability of higher orbitals. We can do similar things with quarks by applying neutrons and the shedding of energy is either fission or fusion. That may be a technological barrier rather than a barrier of possibility. The question becomes, if all motion is stopped does mass and energy and time cease to exist? Can a finite region of such nothingness be created? If so, it would be the opposite of the black hole singularity. Maybe I'm thinking in the wrong direction...in a black hole, gravity is so large that time slows down. The Hawking-Thorne arguement about the existance of black holes was whether the universe had existed long enough for black holes with infinitessimally slow time to completely form.

Here is a good book on time that I've read several times: https://www.amazon.com/Now-Physics-Time-Richard-Muller/dp/0393285235

Richard Muller is a physics professor at UC Berkeley and is more of an experimentalist than a theoretician; i.e. he works on experiments to test theories.

The book deals with how time is measured, relativity, why it is unidirectional, and what it might be. It also discusses the expansion of space and posits that the advancement of time is related to the creation of new space as it is the creation of new moments.

I may be staring at the ceiling late at night considering time...or I may be sleeping.

Peace

What was the temperature of the void before the big bang?

According to current theory nothing existed before. What is nothing?

A quote from the bible:

In the beginning there was the void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said "Let there be light"

(The first Photon) and everything else proceeded from that..

Whether or not you are religious or not, it is uncanny how some scientists agree with that.

(https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Saleh+Theory&atb=v475-1&ia=web)

No. We do not know what existed before the Big Bang. Many people latch onto the acceptable idea that nothing existed prior, but that is but one possibility.

One problem with the old-time writings (and/or translators) is that they didn't have the language to properly describe the events. Thus "void" to them may mean something different than it does to us.

I agree with with Albert E.--- Everything is an illusion.

The brain has a certain normal scan rate, just like a video camera.

However, this scan rate can be modified by stress or fear, or suprise.

I remember time moving in slow motion once. I was in a convenience store at the counter, checking out, when I heard a loud noise to my right. I turned and saw glass falling in slow motion, as the car, also in slow motion, broke through the window and rammed into the aisle where I had been only a few seconds before.

I was truly blessed that day.

I cannot yet tell, but I make the mental experiment of removing one by one the atoms and the energy that causes them to move (by emitting photons, which in turn causes the Brownian motion etc.)

Do we experience any slow down of time? Does the sense of time change when we have let with just a single atom frozen to 0K? Sees no, as time ticks in the protons that may decay after some (long long) time. Now remove even this last atom. I wonder how doing such a tiny little change to the system, will cause such a tremendous change in Nature, to the point that one of its coordinates in the space-time canvas will cease to exist.

Or you can think it this way: You take all matter (e.g. this atom) and move it far away. Does time change? Move it even farther, several billions of light years. Any change? Move it to infinity now. Do you expect that time will stop only then?

One could of course claim that time ticks only when matter/energy events happen, therefore, if you have a single photon standing there idle, you have no passage of time, but when it decays after some million years, suddenly the Nature's clock ticks in a quantum leap.

We will have to accept that either time exists in its own right, or it is an emergent macroscopic reality. In the latter case, talking about the decay period of a single proton is irrelevant. In the end, a mind has to perceive time, and a mind is itself a set of atoms, with a lot of emergent complexity. Is, therefore, time a matter of perception?

Interesting comment ! At present time is measured by a manmade system based on a 24 hour cycle which has been split down to thousands of a second or projected forwards into Light years or even measured in "Ages" such as the Ice Age.
So what unit of time do we use to measure ? If we rely on the earth spinning round the sun to establish time then the measurement will, over time, (no pun intended) be incorrect as the world is slowing down.

It has been many years since the official definition of time here on Earth was based on the rotation of the Earth.

"The SI is the system of units in which

• the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom ΔνCs is 9 192 631 770 Hz"

Hz is of course equivalent to cycles per second, so effectively the above number is the definition of the second, which is the international definition of time.

One could of course claim that time ticks only when matter/energy events happen,

This reminds me: When a tree falls in a forest, but no one is around to hear it, there is no noise.

therefore, if you have a single photon standing there idle, you have no passage of time, but when it decays after some million years . . .

We need to remember that a single particle may decay right now or it may be in millions of years. The often-used "half life" is an average for many, many particles.

...so, time could be an emergent feature when all quantum events are "averaged". But in this case, we do need matter/energy to get that averaging effect. The question is whether time is an intrinsic feature of the space-time canvas, or is just a macroscopic perception. If we get in paths like this, we may even question space itself: Is it an effect of the vacuum (which is not exactly empty nothingness)?

The time has come for me to exit this thread before I cease to exist.

My take is this.

Time is a concept that allows us to consider that events happen in a linear fashion and if we want to measure time then we need a source of what we perceive as regularly occurring events in order to quantify time passing.

So you can see that there has always been time even when there was nothing to "measure" it with.

At some point in time an event occurred in the boundless void. Yes this void was devoid of Energy until this event occurred. That was the spontaneous creation of two entities with equal and opposite characteristics. These entities moved apart and created a tension between them in the void. This process started repeating itself.

If two of these opposite entities were able to be forced together they would annhialate and the energy that had existed in the space between them would vanish.

Crucially entities of the one (lets call it chirality) tended to cluster together as did those of the opposite chirality, moving apart and thus forming the two progenitor types of energy clouds that eventually formed the universe we "know" today, through the multiple fluctuations and eventual BB.

Do I understand this theory to mean that there are 2 universes, one "positive" and the other "negative?"

That is my understanding of the theory in that post as well, but, AFAIK, no one has any evidence for what preceded the Big Bang. I'm certainly not capable of conceiving what that may have been!

Did somebody limit it to only 2 universes? Why can't there be 7 universes with 33 variants of time?

IMHO, this is the unverifiable complication of string theory. Let's add more dimensions to the problem, instead of solving anything.

Let's add more dimensions to the problem, instead of solving anything.

From what little I understand about string theory, I do not like it. It has too many ifs, buts, exceptions, etc. I suspect the correct theory, if we ever find it, will be relatively simple--if you can call Einstein's stuff simple!