Does Time Exist?

[Worm of Despite]

I personally don't think it does. I believe we're in the same exact time as we were at the Big Bang, and time is only a quantifier or measure for change, especially movement in physics (the sun), velocity, and the overall geographical changes we witness. And of course human changes, historical; we need the concept of time just like we need the stars in the sky: to tell where we are.

To me, time is no more real than the past, as the past exists as an idea in our head and that idea can be altered entirely by who controls history. I don't believe time is something we move through--simply that we have space within which to move. I suppose it all depends on if you believe there is a dimension of time that governs our physics--a sequenced dimension which has a forwards and backwards (which would indicate time travel).

But no one has time traveled, and there's been no indication of time travel (people from the future; you'd think they'd be rampant or changing stuff, but indeed they must be so advanced or well-trained they might as well not be here; tourists perhaps?). Or we might have to build the machine first, and even then the machine can only go back to when it was built, no earlier.

Anyway, your thoughts? I don't see so much time of day, but merely a system man made to quantify the cycles of the sun around the planet (and moon, etc.) so we can get shat done and done fast in our short existences (which are less than a fraction of an eyeblink in terms of geological time).

[Loredoctor]

Briane Greene suggested that the sequential process of day and night, and the cyclic nature of the Earth orbiting the sun (and with the planets orbiting the sun), sets in our minds that there is this time-like nature to the universe. That is, it can be broken down into units - that there are days, minutes and hours. Of course, time in the sense of actual units does not exist. But we are aware of the passage of time in that things progress forward. That is, we age. An egg falls off a table and shatters, or ice melts in a glass of water. We do not see these things happen in reverse. It is argued that we should do away with the passage of time, and instead look at a system of entropy. Or in other words, of systems of gradually becoming more disordered (disorder being a measure of disorder in a physical system). So like an egg going from a highly ordered state (whole) to a highly disorganised state (broken), it is theorised that the universe began in a highly organised low-entropic state. Gravity has acted on matter, and gravity happens to be the most effective system of increasing entropy in the universe (black holes being the most highly entropic systems ever). The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy does not decrease, so systems (the universe) can only get more disordered. In this sense, we perceive an arrow of 'time'.

In this sense, time as we know it does not exist. But we perceive things changing - going from order to disorder. There is therefore an arrow of events.

[Avatar]

Depends what you mean by time...if you mean that events follow each other in a sequence, then yes. But I believe that the measurement of time is a human construct. And I think my solipsist bent leads me to suspect that time is perception.

I have however sometimes suspected that time is a form of energy, and that, as such, it cannot be destroyed, only change state. Which means that all time that has passed, must have gone somewhere...It has been converted from future energy, to present energy, and from there to past energy.

Time could be nothing but another direction, and at some point, technology may allow us to alter our position relative to the time flow. Our concept of time is purely human-derived, yet, it must have passed for millennia before we were ever there to observe it, to apply our limited understanding and manipulation to it.

Why do we conceive that time is uni-directional? Nature and the universe are symmetrical. Why not time? I believe that the error lies in our perceptions. The nature of our conception of time is flawed, and until we repair it, time will be forever closed to us.

--A

[Loredoctor]

From what I have read, I do not think that time is symmetrical. I will have to read some more. There are some interesting experiments where they think that particles must be communicating back in time, but that can also be explained in other ways (see Transactional Interpretation).

[Avatar]

Maybe it's not. But it would be more elegant.

--A

[Vader]

I don't even think that time exists outside the human perception as "events follow each other in a sequence".

(Again) I follow Kant here. Time is form of thought, a filter in our hand that is the basis of our way of percieving things. If time existed independent of us, outside of us, it would be subject to empiral perception. Since we can only percieve things in so far as we put them into the context of time and space, a perception of time couldn't be possible without postulating the existence of time beforehand.

However we can never be sure if there is something beyond the human capibility of perception that corresponds time and space as entities. If it is beyond our perception, however, it has no relevance for us and can thus be neglected. Here I would cite Wittgenstein: "What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence".

[Zarathustra]

Well, we've known since Einstein that time is relative. I think this this astounding fact is too easily forgotten in our daily lives. Even though we know it, we take it for granted and forget how mind-boggling it is. The fact that we're all "in the same moment" merely because we're in the same reference frame is definitely freaky--that it's possible for humans to leave this reference frame (by traveling away from earth at nearly the speed of light) so that we're not all in the same moment together. Wow. It's not even "merely a theory," but proven empirically with atomic clocks. Hell, it's such a mundane fact of our existence, that our GPS systems wouldn't work without taking into account that the satellites which give us directions in our cars are in a different "temporal flow" than we are due to their acceleration around our planet. Again: wow.

So in a very real sense, *absolute* time is an illusion, much like a geocentric universe was an illusion. What does this mean for time "in general?" Hell if I know.

I used to freak myself out thinking, "Why am I alive in this moment? Why is this moment the crest of the wave of the living present?" People were alive and knowing a thousand years ago, riding this very same wave into the future. That era was just as real as this one; and soon this one will be just as ABSENT as that one. How can such a fundamental barrier be so ephemeral? Why does reality itself only exist in a thin sliver of a moment? The entire world is only real in as much as it exists NOW. And then it's obliterated, to be replaced by NOW. The patterns we can trace through these instances of reality, how it changes from one moment to the next in a "logical" or "reasonable" fashion is the only thing that binds it all together.

[Vraith]

The greeks actually had 2 words related to time...one was Kairos (sp?), and I forget the other. One was related to ordinary, mechanically measurable time, the other was related to our perception of time [you're having a great day and don't even notice time while you're 'in the moment' sort of timeless. Or the way that certain events (like the time I ran into a moving car on my bike, and flew over the hood) seem to take place in super-slow motion, though they're actually very rapid. And perceptual and mechanical time are both real time.
And I ran across an odd quote once [paraphrase]= "If observations reach far enough, everything happens at the same time, if observations last long enough, everything happens in the same place."
I have doubts about the symetricallity (don't mind me if I'm making up words) of the universe...to be sure, most mathematical models of it demand some version of the symetrical, but mathematics is always demanding [requires] things that do not and cannot, in fact, exist.
Overall, I think time exists, but the relativity of it [perceptual and physical], and the lack of it in some situations [black holes, at light speed if the theories are correct] indicates that it must originate, or be grounded in something else, or at minimum co-dependent on other things.