Thinking about it for a minute, there is a probability curve that it is on somewhere in the universe at any given time. Sorry..... I'll get my coat
I see there is a new book out it was in the Sunday Times Review section Its 2 guys a philosopher and a physicist trying to debunk the current models as they have so many inconsistencies The Singular Universe & the Reality of Time Roberto Mangabeira Unger & Lee Smolin I'll leave it for now but when it comes out in paperback I'll probably get it
Damn, I wasn't cryptic enough - firmly in devils advocate territory no one has volunteered to explain/disprove this 'universally accepted' system yet
Oooooo... someone is bound to point out that it is far from "universally accepted"... And by "someone", obviously I mean... well, you know
I was just going to point out that years aren't SI units, so you can invent anything you like to keep track of them - it doesn't make any difference. The metre was pretty arbitrary, but then all the other SI units had a connection to it, and then to themselves, so it all hangs together.
I had better point out then (in case this was supposedly posted as an adequate reply to my post requesting an explanation into the origins of the whole BC/AD year indexing system) that this comes across as a massive 'Fail' from me, but maybe I misunderstood and i'm certainly confused - vague references about how 'you' can invent anything to keep track of them??
Maybe I didn't understand the question. What I took it to mean, in the context of this thread, is the the BC/AD convention for naming years is a bit arbitrary. Why should it be this? And my reply was, that yes, it is arbitrary. It's just convention so that we all know (or at least in the West) what we are talking about. But years based on this system have nothing to do with physics or mathematics, so it doesn't matter. I suppose the Islamic world might not use this system, but that's fine, and I bet the Chinese have another system. You could have a date that is significant of anything you choose and start counting from there, just so long as the people you are trying to communicate with know what you mean.
Hence the Mayan calendar, and all that crap about "the world is going to end because we've come to the end of the Mayan calendar" a little while ago. Their calendar did not predict the end of the world, they just hadn't predicted anything beyond the end of the cycle that they had worked out... and so the world didn't end. It was just a way of calculating time from, as Glid rightly points out, an arbitrary starting point...
