Past, Present and Future

[kandrathe]

He added that IF the future did not happen then how come there are those who can predict the future like Nostradamus.

Yeah, I agree with Jester on Nostradamus. It's not like he said, "London will be devastated by a tidal wave on July 12, 2012." Prophecy, when given cryptically, and couched in vagueness is not much use if you need to fit it to past events.

But, I believe the topic deserves objective open minded skepticism.

A fairly schientific approach was done by an aeronautical engineer, "An Experiment with Time" by J. W. Dunne. He was obsessed with trying to understand his own prescient dreams, and the nature of time itself. Based on his careful observations, he constructed a view of the universe where in our unconsciousness we experience time as a jumble of past, present and future combined. He is not the only person in history to arrive at this conclusion, as it fits with the Mayan, Aboriginal Australian, and even St. Thomas Aquinas.

Hence, again, my interest in scientific quantum processes related to human consciousness.

Again, we are back to consciousness, and our waking experience being bound into our reality of 3 physical dimensions and moving linearly forward in a time dimension, as Pete described, at a rate of 1 second per second. But, we know by the work of mathematicians and physicists (e.g. Einstein, Hawking, et. al.) that time is not a steady stream, and that both space and time are greatly perturbed by the existence of matter itself. In a nutshell, I view time as a human construct that helps us explain our reality. Consider that at the moment of the big bang, the universe as we know it (both space and time) began.

Or, as Crusader mentioned, perception is anchored to our experience of reality, but we might hypothesize an observer who exists in a different frame of reference with more dimensions of space-time, who would view us as we view a painting on a canvas, or perhaps as a single photon flashing into existence for just a moment (welcome to Who-ville). We can describe that as multiple universes, or dimensions beyond our perceptions, but this enters the realm of untestable metaphysical speculation.

A last comment on travel though time other than (forwards at 1 second per second); We know that the closer you are to a large mass (gravitational time dilation) slows time, and the faster you move in relation to the origin (special relativistic time dilation) slows time. In other words, if you theoretically blasted off earth toward a fairly massless area of space and accelerated to near light speed for a year, then returned to earth two years later, the time difference would be that two years passed for the spacecraft, but 20 years have passed on Earth. Now, you, would be the younger brother.