Ill bight .....


I will say it is right twice a day in 12hrs mode

MM on second thought the Earth rotation mite have something to do with it being wrong ....?

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It really depends on you definition of "right" and "broken".

If it is an analogue clock with no second hand it would be difficult to say exactly what second it stopped, so plausible.

If it did have a second hand then it depends on how far you want to break time down into, milli, micro or nano seconds, even then with an analogue clock, it might be difficult to tell the exact time it stopped. If you had the finest measuring equipment on the planet then yes the instant of time when a working clock and the broken clock read the same would be so small to be non existent, so busted!

Of course if you just take the spirit of the saying and happened to look at the broken clock when the hands appeared to be in the exact same position as a similar clock you could well believe that both were telling the same time, so confirmed.

Of course if it was a digital clock, all bests are off. :-0

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What about midday
not 1 tillion to
or 1 tillion past
but midday 1200hrs

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Time does not stand still, therefore in theory there is no one instant in time that the clock is at midday. It is always going to be fast or slow. whether it is a billionth, trillionth, zillionth of a second is irrelevant.

For all practical purposes to an earthbound observer, a stopped clock WILL be a reasonably accurate display of the current time twice a day on a 12 hour clock-face. But scientifically it simply cannot do that. That is my point :-)

A stopped clock is neither fast nor slow. It is stopped.

Chris is stuck in Xeno's paradox, pre-Leibniz and pre-Newton, thinking all limits are limits that cannot be reached, only approached.

Lets solve this another way. One plank unit of time before noon, it is wrong. One plank unit later: is it noon, or still before or past? Another plank unit later and it is obviously past noon. But what about that middle plank unit?

As physics seemingly tells us the smallest unit of time is a plank unit, this in essence digitizes time. If time is digital, then it becomes an exercise in words, if noon falls on a plank unit. If time is analog, then it must pass through noon, as limit theory tell us. If time is digital it may be out of phase with the passage of plank units.

I think the answer is: Which theory of the Universe do you believe in.

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Chris is stuck in Xeno's paradox, pre-Leibniz and pre-Newton, thinking all limits are limits that cannot be reached, only approached.

Gosh, it really is going to be one of those weeks .....

Who was it that said only today that I thought that Einstein was wrong and that we can travel faster than light. ...

More fundamentally: Is what we call "the passage of time" continuous or in discrete quanta?

Or is all this lost in Schrodinger uncertainty of quantum philosophy??


(Whatever your time zone... Would that make a broken 12-hour clock 'right' 48 times a day?... ;-) )

Keep searching,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

The point is that you cannot observe things with precision at the very small Planck limits. Since time is the illusion by which we order events in our lives--it stands to reason that we might as well say that time advances digitally at one Planck interval after another since we cannot observe any event that is smaller in time and space.

No matter what time the broken clock is at, there will be two points in 24 hours in which the actual time EXACTLY coincides with the broken clock. No matter how accurate a time you want to measure to.

The only argument is how long is the time the same? well, only as long as the resolution you are measuring to. :-)

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#resist

A stopped analog clock displays the correct time twice a day in my book. A stopped digital clock in my experience has a blank display.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Time is continuous and flowing, not in discrete steps.

Actually we are not talking about actual time flow but our perception of it. The premise was "a broken clock is right twice a day" Perhaps better expressed as " an analog clock, with hands that is not running will tell the correct time twice a day" Now if that clock was a modern "stepping" clock with a second hand. As a normal human being we would see it say the correct time to the second twice a day.

As for "Planck time" I don't have a vacuum handy nor a way of measuring light travelling 1.616199(97)×10−35 meters!!

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As to plank time, we can never know when noon is to better than a plank time. That is many orders of magnitude smaller than the best atomic clocks presently keep time. So we don't know when noon is. But we know when it is before noon, and when it is afternoon so we deduce that at some point between these it must have been noon. Therefore the clock must have been right somewhere between these two points. The only exception can be if time is quantized and no point happens to fall on noon.

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