can time be measured?

can time be measured?

we do measure time and call the increments by names such as minutes hours etc. yes time can be measured.

this fact does not bother people who try to write "cool sounding ideas" such as "the elements of space and time canot be measured". how poetic and misleading. the passage of time between events is measurable because time is measurable. quantity.

when was the beginning of time?

this question is stupid because first we must ask "wes there a beginning".

only religious who claim god created time can claim that before the creation of time there was no time or as one website said "there was  no before' prior to" the creation of time.

if one hour ago i startr=ed to count one hour then by now one hour passed.

if infinite a started to count then infinite hours passed.

simple logic.

adding math-words to the sentence is not any better- consider shooting light at a mirror- if the source moves then the light will not 'return straight back' but will pass where the source was. if it is shot at an angle then the light could pass the new place of the train but then the distance is measurable and in fact "the same as what the observer outside the train sees as well as the one inside" who has moved to the new place.

yet somehow that does not bother Tianlu who wrote : "Imagine now, that we're in a train moving at constant velocity $v$ and we point a beam of light upwards towards a mirror that then reflects the beam directly back down.  In our frame (train frame) the light will have traveled a distance of $d=2h$ in a time $t=d/c$.  BUT an observer outside the train would see that the light has traveled greater than $2h$because the train will have moved as well." at quora site.

adding math-words to the sentence is not any better, as we can see. if the mirror is in the train then the distance is so small [to the roof of the train] that that the light jumped from the source and back before the train moved because TRAINS TRAVEL SLOWER THAN LIGHT. if the mirror is high above the train then the light would miss because time passed and the light moved through space.

in sci-fi time is shown as slower near a black hole. the observer from a distace sees the people nearer to the black hole as moving slower than themselves.

the theory is that time raltes to the mass of the matter. if the mass is great then time is slow whereas in weaker gravity time is faster.
to demonstarte: in weaker gravity if i go sixty miles per hour  the hour passed faster- relative to the hour in stronger gravity. in both places we traveled sixty miles because an hour passed but the hour was longer in the more intense gravity.

assuming this is true when two people decide to sleep separately for eight hours and one is on a mountain, then the eight hours- although being 8 is "less than" the eight hours on the surface. if there would be no matter then there would be zero mass and time would not pass because it would be infintely less gravity and time "would pass" infinitely faster! which is just silly words.

if we imagine the moment of the big bang- all the mass would be "together" much greater gravity force than any of the separate black holes matter because the total of those matters and more were at the point of the big bang grapefruit or whatever. if so time would be infinitely slow and there would be no after for the matter to "bang" out over time. 

andrew explains at stackexchange "your clock would stop" near a black hole- and if so- certainly more at the greater mass at the mass before the big bang.

compare http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25759/how-exactly-does-time-slow-down-near-a-black-hole

so people who believe in science would have the problem of "no after" if the mass were truly in one spot before the big bang. time would be infinitely slow- which they deny because there was an after. yet if physics are true then there is no after and at the same time religionists say there is "no before". i think we must combine both views into one fact: there is no before and there is also no after!