I heard about einsteins theory of relativity (or something), like if ur in a different planet vs on earth, one person may grow older faster than other guy? well this still doesn’t make sense to me. the way i see time is that its just a way of keeping count of somethings age. but scifi movies and einsteins theory is like saying time is affected by speed?
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Look into a thing called Time Dilation, in simple terms the faster you go, the more time dilation will occur. Time dilation is the difference in the time that goes by as measure by 2 clocks…
In philosophy, the word time describes the form of change or sequence of events perceived by human consciousness. These changes give rise to the impression of a “direction of time”.
In an absolute sense, the faster you move, the slower time passes for you relative to someone who is “standing still” from your reference point.
This goes all the way up to the speed of light! Time doesn’t pass for a photon, one moment it leaves the source, the next moment it arrives at its destination, out of its own frame of reference, zero time has passed, out of our frame of reference on earth, it moved at 670 000 000 miles per hour in a vacuum.
Remember that time is only a man-made interpretation of things we see and try to understand for ourselves. Our assumptions are very simplistic, and work very well as approximations for our daily experiences.
The fastest humans have ever moved relative to earth is about 24 200 miles per hour on the apollo rockets to the moon. This is only 0.0035% of the speed of light – absolutely insignificant.
I don’t have anything to add as these 3 comments sum it up perfectly: from a scientific, Etymological and philosophical perspective. How satisfying!
Not a full answer, but may help.
Space and time are not different things but different aspects of a single thing called spacetime. You are constantly moving in spacetime at a constant rate. That movement can be focused solely on time (ie standing still but time still moves forwards) or shared between the two (i.e. walking – where you are moving in space and time). As you get faster and faster in space, more of your movement is towards the space aspect rather than time and so time slows down. The nature of the equations means that you would only notice these effects at extremely fast speeds, hence Newton’s equations, which were formulated without taking into account spacetime, still work fine for most real world scenarios.
Complicating things, spacetime is all relative so you would not notice time (and space) changing yourself, only relative to others.
Time is what clocks measure.
If you take a look at what a clock actually does, if you open up a clock and take a cold scientific look at the empirical evidence, you will see cogs turning or a crystal oscillating. You will see that the clock features some kind of regular cyclical motion along with something like gears or a counting device, and it gives some kind of display of the thing we call “the time”. However all that’s actually happened is that cogs etc have moved, and the big hand has moved along with the little hand.
The point is that there is no actual thing called time that’s literally flowing. Instead light moves, planets move, people move, hearts move, blood moves, lungs move, air moves, electrochemical signals move in nerves and brains, and so on. Everything moves, including pendulums and cogs in clocks, and oscillating quartz crystals and electrons in the circuitry within the watch upon your wrist. It’s a measure of motion.
Remember speed is distance traveled over time. So: miles per hour or, speed = miles/hour
Now, imagine I am on a train moving 60 mph. I bounce a ball on the table in front of me. It bounces one yard up and back down. To me, if I trace its movement, it has moved up and down in a straight line.
Now imagine you are on a train station platform and you see my train pass by. You can see the ball I am bouncing. To you, on the platform, if you trace the movement of the ball it will make and arc. Not only is it traveling up and down, it is also moving from left to right from your perspective. The distance that arc traces in longer than the up and down line I trace.
BUT…here’s the kicker, we both measure the same amount of time it took the ball to complete one bounce.
How can this be? Your clock says it took (say) three seconds and my clock says it took three seconds. But the ball you measure traveled further.
The ONLY explanation for this is that our clocks disagree (they are running at different rates).
This disagreement between clocks has been experimentally proved many, many times. Indeed, the GPS in your phone is only reliable because it accounts for this difference in clocks (the GPS satellites are moving pretty fast and that has a noticeable effect on their clocks).
So the old standard is we are both the same age. I leave the earth in a ship an travel at almost the speed of light for what you perceive as 10 years. I’m able to stop the ship then turn around and get up to almost the speed of light again for what you perceive as another 10 years. I get back to earth and am able to stop and land. For you 20 some years have passed for me only 3 years have passed. You are 20 years older I’m 3 years older. That is relativity.
The time frames are just made up as no math was done. We can’t currently make such a trip but that is what you were asking about.
Time is what links the 3 dimensional space of our universe with the history of everything that has ever been in it
Imagine you are standing in one place. You can walk in any of the 4 cardinal directions. Imagine further that there is a ladder at a your location that goes up and down. You can move in any of the 3 spatial dimensions. You can go north or south, east or west, up or down. Its up to you which way you move. But there is a fourth dimension, time. Unlike the other three dimensions you are constantly moving in time, you have little to no control over that. Whether you move forward or backward, left or right, up or down, or stand in one spot, you will continue moving in time. Think of it like being on a train thats traveling from the south, to the north. You have no control over the train, its moving whether you like it or not. Time is the train of life, it moves whether we like it or not. You are free to move within the train of time, but its simply a different dimension in which we exist.
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