“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
In: Physics
Time is a dimension of spacetime. We move through it at what we perceive as a constant rate of one second per second. This perception isn’t reality, at least in more extreme and curved parts of the Universe. The illusion is persistent because our experience is just with one tiny planet around one ordinary star.
absolute time is an illusion, the notion that time flows the same for everyone under every condition.
If you put precise clocks into orbit around Earth, then collect them a few years later, they are desynced. that is not fault of the clock, but a wierd consequence of gravity.
Fast objects have clocks that tick slower. You can send one of your twins on a fast rocket, have him return, and he will be younger than you…
Time is an illusion, a mental construct created by man. In the grand scheme of things Science is an illusion, a mental construct created by man. Words such as Planets, Solar System, Gravity,et al are all merely words used to identify observed objects.
According to the theories of Einstein, all time exists at once, and is a meaningless concept outside of the human perception. There is no distinction between any events aside from what humans experience. The universe doesn’t give a shit what year it is. It exists in a state of eternal timelessness. This is why time is referred to as a 4th dimension.
Easy explanation (i think)
So imagine if there was a giant clock on the earth, no matter how long away you are from it, you can always see it.
Now imagine that you are in a spaceship that is traveling at near light speed or light speed moving away from the earth, the clock doesn’t change no matter for how long or far you go away from it (if you are traveling at light speed) but time passed for you, but not for everyone on earth. So when you stop, the clock continues again and time has moved for you, but not for the people on earth, lets say you had a wristwatch and 10 minutes has passed on the watch, but not on the clock on earth, so time has “passed” 10 minutes for you, but 0 seconds on earth
Imagine you are watching a movie. You take a pause in the middle of the movie. You have the option of rewinding and re-watching something that happened earlier, or you can skip ahead and watch the ending. Humans like to imagine time as being similar to a river, or a roll of film. We imagine things that happened in the past as if they still exist. The ‘past’ is a place we could travel to if we could only get the DeLorean to 88 miles per hour.
This is not how the universe really works. There is no past. There is no future. Those are not places that exist. There is only the present. Even after things change, it is still the present. Even after many years, when we are all old and gray, we are still in the present, although the arrangement of things has changed around a bit.
One of the big discoveries to come out of Einstein’s work is that time is relative. We don’t experience it the same way, and a person near a large gravitational object or travelling at near light-speed will experience time very differently.
So let’s say we took a trip to the supermassive black hole in ‘Interstellar,’ where time moved slower. We return to Earth and find 20 years have passed. Does that mean we somehow skipped into the future? No. We were always living in the present and it was the same present as everyone else. It’s just that our rate of change was different so our *perception* of time is skewed.
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