Does Time Exist???

[Irishdragon]

Hello All,

This is one I have been thinking about for years and I am of the opinion that it does not. Time is really just a concept invented by humans to give us a little perspective in our everyday lives. Time really does not age us, but rather the effect of gravity ages us, wears us down, makes us old. I'd like to get your thoughts on the subject, so please don't be shy

 

[Ice Cold]

No I don't feel time exists. It is something we invented to mark the course of our lives into managable little portions.

 

[BustyTheClown]

Interesting question... I think time does exist in the sense that life moves forward in a linear fashion. We are not stuck in once place, and we do not move backwards. Time, in a sense, moves forward.

Time in the yearly/monthly aspect also exists. However, humans were instrumental in giving us this whole "Thirty days hath September" schpiel, as well as hours, minutes, etc. We even designed devices like sundials to make it seem natural.

People need time now. If we could "turn back the clock," so to speak (bad thread for that phrase, but I'm not sure how else to word it, lol), and our dependence on hours, minutes, and seconds had not been so indoctrinated, I think we'd have been fine. We wouldn't be the same, but we could have lived with it. But we can't go back now -- people would go insane if time as we have constructed it ceased to exist. Studies have proven as much.

Time is real, and important, but I don't think I'll ever believe that it will ever be real or important enough to be measured in something as ridiculous as "nanoseconds."

 

[Irishdragon]

Good points...

Time is really just a measure of distance; I beleive 1 second is the time it takes an electron to travel through the nucleus of a cesium atom, but don't quote me on that...I am a chemistry guy not a physics guy. But when you look at the sky...or even a human being you are not seeing them as they are at that exact time. You are seeing them after the photons have aborbed light at the required wavelength, then the light has been reflected back from that person to your eye which does not happen instantly....takes a little while. Or if the sun suddenly blew up....we would not see the explosion for 8 minutes (time it takes light to get from the sun to earth.)

 

[Zamdrist]

Hello All,

This is one I have been thinking about for years and I am of the opinion that it does not. Time is really just a concept invented by humans to give us a little perspective in our everyday lives.

I've liked had that same thought myself for years...that's creepy.

The earth does rotate and orbit the sun, and seasons do come and go, so even without man's concept of time, time does pass.

 

[BustyTheClown]

Or if the sun suddenly blew up....we would not see the explosion for 8 minutes (time it takes light to get from the sun to earth.)

I thought it took a matter of years (1-2?) for the light of the sun to reach earth...

 

[Guest]

Reading "The Confessions of St.Augustine" may help you with this time question.

 

[BustyTheClown]

Time is really just a measure of distance.

Btw, I think Einstein was one of the first people to make this claim. Lol forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'd like to think I learned something in my high school physics class...

 

[Zamdrist]

I could be mistaken

I thought it took a matter of years (1-2?) for the light of the sun to reach earth...

But I don't think we are even a full light year from the sun...

 

[Spinaroonie]

Time exists so everything doesn't happen at once.

 

[QuickDuck]

In the words of the great prophet Ford Prefect.....

"time is an illusion, lunch time, doubly so"

/wave
QuickDuck

 

[Dillinger]

Actually there is quite a lot of scientific "evidence" that will agree with you on this. Time is indeed a human construct. May physisicts - following the quantum model - will tell you that "time only exists because we believe it exists." (And who is to say that even our perception of time is real? *lol*)

We are often given the advice "live for the moment" or "live in the moment" - which has more portent then we usually consider. All we really have are the moments.

Even St. Augustine had said that time is measured in the mind. (As Storm1969 mentioned) It is not the event itself that is measured, you see, but rather the impression that the event has left on the mind. That the mind, your mind, remembers.

A book that might be of interest on this subject is "The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics" (Oxford University Press) British physicist Julian Barbour. Barbour asks the question "If nothing changed, would time pass?" - and the answer he comes up with is... "NO."

"If nothing happened, if nothing changed, time would stop," he writes. "For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive as occurring all around us, not time. In fact, time doesn't exist.

Imagine taking a snapshot of the universe at one moment. You'd get one snapshot or picture. One "now." That's the fundamental concept of how it works. In classical physics, if we put the snapshots together, we perceive the passage of time, much like if we put real pictures together to form a movie. But of course, the motion produced by running pictures together is an illusion, just as it's an illusion to say our series of snapshots of the universe represents time.

Even Isaac Newton had some similar thoughts on this particular subject.

What exists are just "nows." Just individual moments. That is all that science (and philosphy) has been able to prove. That is all that you have in your memories... a series of snapshots that give the illusion of motion.

 

[Private Vasquez]

Time is dead....I killed him last month

 

[BustyTheClown]

I thought it took a matter of years (1-2?) for the light of the sun to reach earth...

I rescind this post and am able to confirm that 8 minutes is the correct amount of time it takes for light from the sun to reach the earth.

 

[Irishdragon]

One of the interesting points on this subject was brought up by Weinberg in his book The First 3 Minutes, which is about the infancy of the universe. If we are to look through a telescope into deep space we are "time travelling" in a way. To view the universal expansion...ie red shifts...we see the universe as it was about 15 billion years ago!!!!! The general reason being that the light we see is at such a distance from us that it takes 15,000,000,000 years to get here. So in reality we will not know what is happening out there right at this very moment for 15,000,000,000 years.

NB...light years= amount of distance light travells in a year. In Vacuum conditions light=2.97X 10^8 meters per second...which is equal to roughly 186,000 miles per second.....Big Damn Universe

 

[bored1]

If time doesnt exist, why do the seasons seem to come and go faster the older I get?

 

[Dirac]

Re: Time

Most physicists would agree time is a real thing.

Put simply, Einstein postulated time as the fourth dimension to a four dimensional construct termed space-time, the extents of which coined the space-time continuum. We now know time is a real thing, as its "passage" is variable. Within a gravitational field (that is, within the gravitational affects of a massive body), time warps, and its perceived passage slows with respect to bodies unaffected by the gravitational field. It is said that the *perceived* passage is illusory (what we experience is really a side-effect of short term memory processes), as time (including what we call the "past" and "future") simply exists.

I hope this helps a little...

 

[Oilpainter]

I Ching

I know very little about physics but have read this thread with fascination because I have pondered this question as well. I have a corillary question. If time does exist when did it begin?

 

[cymbidia]

Re: I Ching

If time doesnt exist, why do the seasons seem to come and go faster the older I get?

bored1, i think that the seasons seem to come and go faster as we get older because we have many more benchmarks against which tro mark the passage of the days. When we are very young, we know it's forever until Christmas, for example, and forever forever forever until school gets out for the summer. Later, we know that our cat Bill died in May, and we remember that our family moved into the new house in October, and we know that we go to Disneyland each year in January cuz the weather's nice there then and there are no crowds.

As we continue to age, our life become correspondingly richer with remembered days of importance, it becomes crowded with our memories of where we've been and what we've done and who we've loved and disliked and brushed up against. It seems to crowd tightly against the days of each month, of each year, because -nearing the ending of our lives- we have so many memories of a full and well-lived span of years.

I know very little about physics but have read this thread with fascination because I have pondered this question as well. I have a corillary question. If time does exist when did it begin?

According to most cosmologists, about 15 to 20 billion years ago the whole universe was formed in a fraction of a second in a gigantic explosion called the Big Bang. That was the beginning of time in our universe, at least as scientists measure such things.

As far as an anthropological view, celestial bodies -the sun, moon, planets, and stars- have provided humans with a reference for measuring the passage of time throughout the whole of our existence. We know that ancient civilizations relied upon the apparent motion of these bodies through the sky to determine seasons, months, and years.

We don't know much about the details of timekeeping in prehistoric eras, but wherever we find records and artifacts of long-dead cultures, we usually discover that some of the people were preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time. Ice-age hunters in Europe over 20,000 years ago scratched lines and gouged holes in sticks and bones, possibly counting the days between phases of the moon. Five thousand years ago, Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valley had a calendar that divided the year into 30-day months, the day into 12 periods (each one was equivalent to two of our hours), and divided these periods into 30 parts (each was like four of our minutes). We have no written records of Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England, but what remains shows clearly that part of its purpose included the determination of seasonal or celestial events, such as lunar eclipses, solstices and so on.

We've always measured time. It's part of the way we drove the dark away and worked to understand the natural forces that pushed and pulled us like puppets in thier wake.

 

[Northern Lights]

I'm voting that time doesn't exist so I can't possibly be late for work tomorrow when I drag my lazy ass into the office an hour after everyone else.

 

[mistressastra]

Astra's rules of time

When you are at work, it slows to half speed. When you are having a good time, it increases to warp speed. When you need more of it, it's never to be found. When you wish it would pass fast, it decelerates to a snail's pace. At times, it stops completely.

 

[Sillyman]

Well, time can be an illusion, like many other things. Certainly aspects of time are made up entirely by man. Hours don't fit quite into days, days don't fit quite into years etc. There tends to be a little bleed where that's concerned. Technically we could have 32 hour days if we wanted.

 

[mistressastra]

*Technically we could have 32 hour days if we wanted.*

If it means longer work days, fuck that!

 

[Sillyman]

*Technically we could have 32 hour days if we wanted.*

If it means longer work days, fuck that!

I'm with you there.

 

[MechaBlade]

Re: I Ching

Time is no more reality than length, width, or height.

I know very little about physics but have read this thread with fascination because I have pondered this question as well. I have a corillary question. If time does exist when did it begin?

I like to think time never began. Just like it'll never end. However, if you believe it isn't real, then it had to have began somewhere.