Weeelllll......

Not that anyone has yet managed to demonstrate. There is a name for such a unit if it does exist: chronon, but whether it is as much as ten to the minus 23, or as little as ten to the minus 44 seconds, and whether it is the same of every kind of entity, and what it would mean for physics or philosophy, I leave to anyone or everyone else.

I don't believe a bit of it, but I have not a bit of solid, reasoned justification for my doubts. However, if there is such a thing as a chronon, it seems to me that there should be a unit of distance as well. What might we call that? Aposton? Diastemon?

Your call!

This is Plank length presumably, Jon.

see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units

In this dimension time, lenghth etc is believed

to become granular . 

(I don't)

Georg

Hi Georg,

In general I agree. I cannot defend my preference, because I have very little idea on what people who like the idea of a chronon base their arguments.  If there has to be a chronon, I would think that the time it takes light to travel the Planck distance (or more likely, I would think) some particular fraction of that distance, seems reasonable. However, in the article on chronons Wiki offers a far longer period for electrons, and says (very believably) that the chronon would vary for different masses. As I understand relativity, your chronon might as well be my interval, and what an observer on Arcturus would see,  I would hate to guess! 

What would be the significance be, of an indivisible unit of time, if there is no limit to how long it might seem? I don't know!

This coming Friday is November 11, 2011.  11/11/11.  Many people will be watching their clocks waiting on 11/11/11 11:11:11.  Might one of them be able to register with the naked eye the exact moment that we call 11/11/11 11:11:11.1?  Possibly.  But surely not 11/11/11 11:11:11.111. 

It was this line of thinking that prompted me to google "indivisible unit of time", because I reasoned that the pattern would never stop unless such a unit existed.  In other words, the clock watchers would be sitting there forever, because 11/11/11 11:11:12 would never arrive.  Instead, the date and time would approach an infinite string of 1's. 

Of course, month, day, year, hour, minute, second, millisecond are simply the constructs we have developed to measure time.  They have nothing at all to do with the essence of time.  Our 11s turn to 12s when we say so.  In this sense, a digital clock that has been concatenating a 1 to a string of 1s since time 1, while useless for making appointments or scheduling sporting events in our world, is just as valid as our current model. 

But it's also just as flawed.  Instead of figuring out when we should turn 11 to 12 (November to December, morning to noon, second to millisecond, etc. - take your pick), now we need to know when to add the next 1.  Whatever interval we choose, we can always divide it by two to increase our clock's precision.  Always, that is, unless time has an indivisible unit.

The Buddhists are keen to point out that it's always now, which greatly simplifies the problem (except for the making appointments and scheduling sporting events part).  I guess this implies that time itself is indivisible.  Or, to put it another way, time itself is the indivisible unit of time.  (Think about it, dude.)  Fair enough.  After all, what is a Buddhist if not someone who strives to apply the scientific method at all times to all experiences? 

I wish that this put my dilemma to rest.  Instead, it just shifted the problem of precision from time to space.  I started thinking about one of Buddhism’s most common symbols – the Wheel of the Dharma, which uses a perfect circle to symbolize, among other things, the perfection of the Buddha’s teaching.  But how can you create a perfect circle if the ratio of its circumference to its diameter can never be expressed as a rational number? 

And to think that I’m going to have to go through all of this again next year on December 12th!

It has recently been surmised that as well as matter and energy etc. being quantized (split into tiny indivisible parts) so is space time, which would indicate that as well as a smallest possible length unit (the Planck length) there is also a minimum limit on time intervals, and there are currently experiments being done to test it. I believe there was an article in the Scientific American on the topic.