[Physics] "True" time

[Ilja Schmelzer]

2016-10-28 12:16 GMT+02:00, Thomas Goodey <thomas at flyingkettle.com>:
> On 28 Oct 2016 at 12:00, Ilja wrote:
> So... absolute time has no definition, and cannot be
> measured, and accordingly intervals of "absolute time"
> cannot be assigned numerical values? What is its meaning,
> then? Is it a pure fantasy?

Of course, not.  The meaning of time is, essentially, the common sense
meaning of the word "time".   It has been used in a meaningful way, in
every human language it is used in one way or another, usually in many
different ways.

I have referred to Newton's definition, so it has a definition, if you
insist on definitions (a quite meaningless exercise outside
mathematics).

> We haven't got much option, do we, since true time cannot
> be measured! Thus, it's not a question of "instead". We
> seem, very sensibly, to be ignoring a fantasy and rather
> dealing with an actual physical parameter.

Not at all.  Try to organize a meeting with somebody else.  To do
this, you have to specify a place and a time.  We can today use
sufficiently accurate clocks, but with much less accurate clocks
organizing such a meeting becomes problematic.  If the two clocks show
different times, even if we synchronize them now, we may not meet.
The failure to meet each other is a very real failure, not?

If your friend comes five minutes later, and you compare the clocks
and see his watch was five minutes wrong, what you decide, for the
future?  Lets simply meet, without any time, once we cannot measure it
accurately anyway?