What is “Time” and how exactly does it work?
In: Physics
Time does not exist in the way we think. It’s not a line; that’s an oversimplification. Throw away any concept of linear time you have and try to see the world you navigate in as millions of small atoms. The movement, decaying and transformation of those atoms (and all other particles) is what we can call time, but it’s not bound to a global ‘timeline’. It all happens locally.
It seems this process seems to go slower when close to heavy objects (like Earth).
So in general when we zoom out, all across the earth the decaying / transformation process is about the same rate to our perception (although we do need to correct this on a low level sometimes in machines).
I think Einstein was wrong that time is relative to motion. There must be a single & central present moment of NOW that applies equally to everywhere and everything that currently IS, no matter it’s relative motion or positioning in “spacetime”. In relativity, no such frame of reference (one NOW) exists. That’s absurd, isn’t it?
It’s the stretching of the glue that was holding the fabric of reality together that was blown apart by the big bang.
Time is a measurement that lets you compare different amounts of energy to each other. Ignore most of these answers about quantum theory, quantum theory has lots of time involved in it and it means the same thing. The fact is that temperature, energy of a beam of light, work done on physical objects, can all be compared to each other by using tile to normalize comparisons.
Time is the monitoring of change and change only happens with energy. Time exists because energy exists but I think it is descriptive instead of prescriptive to an existential mind that can care about time’s being. The less energy the longer time takes (?). I am an amateur so don’t take what I’m saying as dogma. A crude analogy is being nuclear bored at work and time drags so, so slowly.
time is the space between the beginning and the end… and… it works like this… in the beginning was division… God seperated… the first act in thinking… making distinctions… sorting things out.. segregating things… in the beginning was expansion and contraction… which beget… division… addition… multiplication… and… subtraction… therefore… accretion… the gradual build up over time… bit by bit…
There is no experiment that can be done to prove or disprove the existence of time. Time could be something we believe in that doesn’t exist or it could exist. Time may or may not exist however what does exist is measurable actions that can be interpreted as taking a set amount of time such as the rotation of the Earth.
What is time then, basically it’s the duration between two points based on how long the Earth takes to rotate. So the duration between starting this comment and finishing can be measured against the Earths rotation and given a value which we call time.
Time is a dimension, along with the three dimensions of space, that gives you a particular location in space and time. Asking how it works is sort of like asking how the y-dimension of up and down works. In the spatial dimensions, things can move in any of the directions of that dimension so long as they do not go faster than the speed of light. This is similar with time, but for some reason we don’t seem to be able to move backwards in time. This concept is often referred to as the “arrow of time” and it is an unsolved general physics problem. Another thing worth noting is that as we move faster through space relative to a stationary observer, the observer will measure our time as moving slower than their’s. The reasons for why all of these things happen get complicated and are sometimes still unsolved, but they are studied in field like special and general relativity, cosmology, and quantum mechanics (among other fields).
they’re hard to answer, because the two theories we have about how the universe work. treat time differently.
According to Special Relativity (which successfully explains virtually everything we know about huge astronomical bodies), time is one dimension of 4-dimensional *spacetime*, and different bodies can move through it at different speeds depending on their motion through the 3 spatial dimensions.
According to quantum theory (which successfully explains virtually everything we know about particle physics), time is just a background measuring stick that ticks by at a set rate always.
These two understandings of time aren’t compatible with each other, and neither theory can work with the other definition of time. So, time is one of the basic elements of existence that’s still really really hard to figure out. Honestly, I know links are discouraged here, but the wikipedia article for Time might blow you mind with how little we understand it.
I would highly recommend that you read The Order Of Time by Carlo Rovelli. It is so far my favourite book about how time technically doesn’t exist and will lead you down a rabbit hole of further reading. Pretty easily digestible too, considering the subject
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36442813-the-order-of-time
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