- #36
yossell
Gold Member
- 366
- 16
`Biological age' should be distinguished from `chronological age'. The former tracks the wear and tear of an organism over time, the latter the amount of time that has passed for an organism. While 'biological age' clearly refers to organisms, its use could be extended to other systems, to track their changes too.
Biological age clearly must involve change. A forty year old man in a sixteen year old's body implies that certain changes have gone slowly for him and also is illegal in some countries. Chronological age does not so obviously require change (though if time necessarily requires some kind of change, it may) and it's theoretically possible for periodic system to `experience' time, in that it goes through a sequence of changes, yet returning to exactly the same qualitative state.
(Perhaps, then, here I disagree with Fredrik's last post )
It seems to me that the argument that the decay rate of fundamental particles shows that their `biological' age does not change - they are intrinsically the same for the whole of their lifetime. But the notion of time passed, and in particular, relativistic time dilation, also makes sense for muons - they do have a half life, which is a function of the proper time, and fast traveling muons live longer.
By contrast, traveling on light-cones, not even this much can be said for photons.
Biological age clearly must involve change. A forty year old man in a sixteen year old's body implies that certain changes have gone slowly for him and also is illegal in some countries. Chronological age does not so obviously require change (though if time necessarily requires some kind of change, it may) and it's theoretically possible for periodic system to `experience' time, in that it goes through a sequence of changes, yet returning to exactly the same qualitative state.
(Perhaps, then, here I disagree with Fredrik's last post )
It seems to me that the argument that the decay rate of fundamental particles shows that their `biological' age does not change - they are intrinsically the same for the whole of their lifetime. But the notion of time passed, and in particular, relativistic time dilation, also makes sense for muons - they do have a half life, which is a function of the proper time, and fast traveling muons live longer.
By contrast, traveling on light-cones, not even this much can be said for photons.