How many 'frames' is real life?

[spudzalot]

We all know how video games and animations go by different frame rates. Smash Brothers Brawl goes 60 frames per second. Metroid Prime 3 by 120 (or so). In Flash programs the default number is 8. And some of us have seen horrible flash animations that go a single frame second. But what about real life?

Ive heard some people say something like,"you're life can change in a single second." But what about a millisecond? There are thousands of tiny chemical reactions happening right now in out bodies that happen in an instant. What is the smallest possible fragment of time that something can happen in?

Waving your hand in front of your face really fast and you can tell that its 'skipping frames.' But that is only how fast our brains can register. What about the super amazing cameras that they use on Time Warp to slow everything down to hundreds of frames per second?

How many frames is real life?

[PALEMOON]

i'll just say right now that i wish i could Shuttle Loop and KO people in the space of one frame IRL

[T3chno]

We see about 20 frames per second. It drastically goes up with adrenaline.

[spudzalot]

i'll just say right now that i wish i could Shuttle Loop and KO people in the space of one frame IRL

- - Metaknight Frame Rate Data - -

Every Attack:
To start - 1 frame
Hit box time - enough
Ending lag - 1 frame

Seriously.

We see about 20 frames per second. It drastically goes up with adrenaline.

Didnt know that. Cool. :)

[BNW]

We see about 20 frames per second. It drastically goes up with adrenaline.

"What is often called motion blur, is really how our unique vision handles motion, in a stream, not in a frame by frame. If our eyes only saw frames (IE: 30 images a second), like a single lens reflex camera, we'd see images pop in and out of existance and that would really be annoying and not as advantagous to us in our three dimensional space and bodies."

Taken from http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html .

You can't equate motion capture in film footage to how our eyes see.

I don't think of adrenaline boosting our FPS, but so much as allowing our brain to process more information faster, thus drastically reducing the amount of time and causing us to feel like time has slowed.

[scythe]

Around one hundred million trillion trillion trillion frames per second.

[TribulatioN]

My life would go at 2 fps, just so in moments of ecstasy, even one frame would last and be great.
:D

Techno beat me to the 20 frames thing. But the adrenaline part is pretty cool.

[T3chno]

[quote="BlckNWhteNnja"I don't think of adrenaline boosting our FPS, but so much as allowing our brain to process more information faster, thus drastically reducing the amount of time and causing us to feel like time has slowed.[/quote]

Processing imaging faster = more frames available = larger frame rate

[Exüberance]

I'd say infinite.

True, you could say the time it takes for something moving at the speed of light to cross a distance of the Planck length, but the Planck length is just where we can't know anything smaller. The Planck time is just where it's impossible to measure anything shorter. That doesn't make it a "frame" just because we can't know what's happening inbetween.

[DemonzLunchBreak]

A unit of Planck time is the smallest *meaningful* amount of time. Obviously, from the perspective of mathematics, you could keep dividing that up as much as you want, but any shorter amount of time has no relevance.

[blue_tetris]

Planck time = theoretical. Sweet idea, though. It was the basis for a game idea that AlliedEnvy and I were working at a while ago.

[blackson]

A unit of Planck time is the smallest *meaningful* amount of time.

What makes a given amount of time meaningful? Couldn't this be considered opinion? If I wasted 10 years of my life drinking, would that be a meaningful amount of time?

[T3chno]

A unit of Planck time is the smallest *meaningful* amount of time.

What makes a given amount of time meaningful? Couldn't this be considered opinion? If I wasted 10 years of my life drinking, would that be a meaningful amount of time?

It's another one of those damn subjective things, ain't it? Ugh. Ef it. this whole world is subjective. I'm subjective. You're subjective. amlt is subjective. This frikin' forum is subjective.

D-;

[DemonzLunchBreak]

A unit of Planck time is the smallest *meaningful* amount of time.

What makes a given amount of time meaningful? Couldn't this be considered opinion? If I wasted 10 years of my life drinking, would that be a meaningful amount of time?

You're confusing yourself with definitions. That amount of time is meaningful in that measurable effects can be observed over that period. Was it an important part of your life? No. Well, maybe. But that's not the point. The point is that "meaningful" in the context that I'm using it in means that there is some kind of use for that unit of time, as there is for a ten-year period. There is no use for a time shorter than Planck time. There is nothing that can be measured in that amount of time. I am not talking about personal significance of a period of time, like you were suggesting. I am talking about the hypothetical ability of someone to measure the behavior of the universe over a period of time.

Measurement is what we use time for, and so a time shorter than anything measurable is meaningless.

It's another one of those damn subjective things, ain't it? Ugh. Ef it. this whole world is subjective. I'm subjective. You're subjective. amlt is subjective. This frikin' forum is subjective.

D-;

No. False. "The world" is objective, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about. It's hard to tell because it's sort of a vague expression. You are not subjective. You are a body. That is objective. I am not subjective. Now, my ideas can be considered subjective, but I would distinguish "me" from "my ideas." I feel like this issue has been brought up already, and I don't want to beat a dead horse. If you really want me to go over why a completely subjective reality is impossible, I'd be happy to, but it would save me quite a bit of time if you were to browse the forum a little bit.

[BNW]

I told you guys this fucking always happens.

:P

[yungerkid]

i don't think real life operates in frames. it's closely related with time; time keeps moving forward at a constant rate.

[jean-luc]

When you think about it, the concept of life having 'frames' violates Heisenberg's Law - in order for there to be frames, moving objects must also have a definite position in each frame. Heisenberg's law states that this is not possible.

[otters]

So, hypothetically, a moving object will just move an infinitely small amount in an infinitely small time.
Theoretically, nothing ever gets anywhere.

[blue_tetris]

When you think about it, the concept of life having 'frames' violates Heisenberg's Law - in order for there to be frames, moving objects must also have a definite position in each frame. Heisenberg's law states that this is not possible.

Correct!

Everyone seems to keep on assuming Planck's natural units are the end-all. They aren't. They were a fun theory. Then better theorists came along.

[DemonzLunchBreak]

So, hypothetically, a moving object will just move an infinitely small amount in an infinitely small time.
Theoretically, nothing ever gets anywhere.

No. Learn calculus.

Everyone seems to keep on assuming Planck's natural units are the end-all. They aren't. They were a fun theory. Then better theorists came along.

Hmm? I think what I've said applies to a probability cloud as well as it does to a definite position.

[otters]

So, hypothetically, a moving object will just move an infinitely small amount in an infinitely small time.
Theoretically, nothing ever gets anywhere.

No. Learn calculus.

...in what context?

[DemonzLunchBreak]

Um. I'm going to say context is pretty much irrelevant here. Anything with limits or infinitesimals should get you to the right place.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

So, hypothetically, a moving object will just move an infinitely small amount in an infinitely small time.
Theoretically, nothing ever gets anywhere.

No. Learn calculus.

...in what context?

Oh is this one-a-them "paradoxes" that aren't actually paradoxes to a calculus student. I don't remember who came up with them. There was one about Hercules racing a tortoise, and another about an arrow.
Point is, infinitesimally small things is exactly what calculus is about. If you study power series or anything at all relevant to integrals, it becomes pretty clear that infinite sums of infinitely small things can easily come out to some practical number. Again, that's how an integral works. That's what it does. It's an infinite sum of infinitely small things.

Very simple example:
Let's say I start walking slowly, then jogging, and then running, such that my velocity scales up with time by increasing by 1 meter/second for every second that passes. In other words, my velocity is based on time: v(t) = t. Let's say I run for 10 seconds (at the end of which I'm moving faster than an Olympic sprinter) -- how far did I travel?
Well, I don't have an average speed to work with, so I'm left with having to add up all the individual distances I moved in each individual amount of time.
To approximate, I could do the following:

• For the first second, I was traveling at 1 m/s. d = r*t, so the distance I moved in the first second is 1 meter.
• For the second second, I was traveling at 2 m/s, so I traveled 2 meters in the second second.
• In the third second, I was traveling at 3 m/s, so I traveled 3 meters in the third second.
• etc.

So we can approximate the distance I traveled by adding those up: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 10 = 55 meters.
If we make the interval smaller, such as half a second, we get even more accurate results:

• In the first half-second, I was moving at half a meter per second, so I traveled 0.25 meters in the first half-second.
• In the second half-second, I was moving at 1 m/s, so I traveled 0.5 meters in the second half-second.
• etc.

Notice that this time I moved 0.75 meters in the first second, compared to the approximation given by going 1 entire second at a time. So clearly, in order to get the most accurate results, we make the window of time infinitely small. We take the integral from 0 to 10 of the velocity with respect to time, and our infinite sum comes out to 50 meters. I moved an infinitely small distance in an infinitely small amount of time, and yet if you actually add up those infinites, you get a completely reasonable answer.

[blue_tetris]

Zeno's paradoxes, I think.

For each 1 meters that the tortoise goes, Hercules can go 10. The tortoise gets a 10 meter headstart. Hercules catches up with the tortoise at 10 meters, the tortoise moves to 11 meters. Hercules catches up with the tortoise at 11 meters, the tortoise moves to 11.1 meters. OH NO THE TORTOISE CAN NEVER CATCH UP.

Without CALCULUS! that is.

11.(1)

[jean-luc]

Zeno's paradoxes, I think.

For each 1 meters that the tortoise goes, Hercules can go 10. The tortoise gets a 10 meter headstart. Hercules catches up with the tortoise at 10 meters, the tortoise moves to 11 meters. Hercules catches up with the tortoise at 11 meters, the tortoise moves to 11.1 meters. OH NO THE TORTOISE CAN NEVER CATCH UP.

Without CALCULUS! that is.

11.(1)

Zeno's paradox becomes really, really nasty, actually.
You see, the matter you brought up is Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, just one of his paradoxes. More interesting is Zeno's Paradox of the Dichotomy of Motion.

I'll use travel as an example. Lets say you want to move from Point A to Point B. You start walking. You get 1/2 of the way there. then 1/3. then 1/4. then 1/5. then 1/6. then 1/7. then 1/8. this goes right on to 1/∞. Although in reality we can go ahead and say that 1/∞ is 0, from a theoretical standpoint it isn't, which means that in reality we never really get to point B. we get infinitely near point B, but never actually there.

This applies to everything, basically meaning that everything is impossible (it gets infinitely close to occurring, but never actually does).

Calculus seems (claims) to have done away with both of these, but there is a large section of philosophers that believe that calculus cannot sufficiently resolve these paradoxes, particularly the Dichotomy of Motion, and so they still hang over mathematical philosophy.