jfred, this is fun. You ask questions and I make up answers. Mqurice's Just So stories.
<Is logic outside of time? >
Yes, because time is just a means of expressing relative positions of things. There isn't any such thing as time as an abstract entity in its own right.
We compare things with a standard, such as how low it takes to go once around the sun, calling that a year, whereas it's just a distance. Then we build a whole house of time-cards on that unit of "time".
Logic is comprised of distance, being relative position, not time.
We call speed distance divided by time. But since time and distance are two sides of the same coin, speed is a slippery little beast, being defined by itself. That Goedel bloke should come in here with his self-reverential stuff. I am because I think and therefore I am. I go 20 km/hour because I go 20 km in once around myself.
Say we have Earth going around the sun. It take one year to go around. We call the distance travelled n kilometres. So we are travelling at n kilometres per year.
But suppose everything sneakily gets bigger - scaled up by a factor of 2. Then unbeknownst to us, the distance travelled is actually doubled. But since we measure time as being once around, we are still travelling at the same speed, even though we are really going twice as fast [if the whole thing was in a transparent Schroedinger box and we were peering in from the outside, comparing the speed with our own clock].
Gravity would have to be scaled too, to maintain stability. So would electric forces, strong and weak. This happens. As the universe "expands" these forces are messed up too. I suppose that's where the infamous Gravitational Constant came from. When the universe was as big as a grapefruit [our size grapefruit, not the pre-expansion size grapefruit], gravity was far different and so were the electric forces and things were really ripping along, though as viewed from then, at much the same "speed" as now.
Anyway, it gets slipperier than a lobster pot full of hagfish, so suffice to say that time is a made-up unit and logic isn't a function of time, though time is a subset of logic.
Got that?
Mqurice |
