It doesnt make sense to me… I know there was a past and there is a future although ‘now’ is fleeting. We measure time in days, weeks, months so how can it be an illusion? Oh and the belief that everything is happening now – what’s that about?
edit1: A lot of people are posting that time is not an illusion and where did I find that information from but there are articles where physicists state that it is. This is one:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html
I just wanted to know if someone could explain it clearly to me and I appreciate everyone who has tried to but it seems like a bit of a tricky and complicated subject. Thanks to all who have posted a comment.
In: Physics
I think it’s because people think of time as a tool they can put on the wall, or you can wear it on your wrist. The past is far behind us and the future doesn’t even exist.
Because time was literally created by humans as a form of measurement. But the thing about it is you can’t really measure it at all. Before humanity suddenly appeared on the Earth, the concept of time simply didn’t exist. And, eventually, when humanity fades, the idea of time will be lost with us.
How do you know there was a past? What if you simply sprung into being at this exact instant with all the “memories” of a past simply created along with you? How could you tell the difference?
But the real issue is that under Einstein’s well-tested views of space-time, everything that has happened, is happening and will happen MUST in some way be already firmly “baked into” the loaf that is space time. It’s a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, but depending on your speed and direction of movement relative to other observers, you may see things happen in a different order than the other observers. In other words, you have different experiences of what has happened in the past (and exactly what is past v. what is present/future). You and the other observers would agree on the order that things happened, but not necessarily when they happened. It’s a bit heady for ELI5, but this video does a decent job laying it out – [Linky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks).
I think it’s about our perception of time. Our sense of “time” comes from movement on a cosmic scale. The earth rotates and gives us days, the earth goes around the sun which gives us years. And our sun and the the whole Milky Way is going around whatever is at the center of our universe, which is constantly expanding. So our sense of “when” we are is really just based off of “where” we are in the universe. As far as the everything Is happening now bit, I think that goes more into multiple dimensions and stuff.
i didnt hear people saying that time is an illusion, do you mean that time is relative?
I don’t remember ever hearing scientists call time an illusion. Our perception of it, perhaps. But as far as I know it’s just another aspect of what we call space. Together they form one thing called space-time, in which time is just as real as space.
Question is based on a false pretense, no reputable research has been done to indicate any such fact. Time can be relative between different observers but the concept itself is absolutely central to any discipline of hard science.
Time is relative. Never heard about the illusion thing.
Imagine you’re on a train that’s not moving and you’re looking at the station it’s currently stationed in. The image of that station travels at the speed of light, right.
Imagine your train starts moving faster than the speed of light and you “catch up” with the image of the train station that left it when you were standing still. You would actually be in the past, since you caught up with images from the past.
If you would move at the exact speed of light, the image would be frozen, since you travel with the same image, at the same speed. So time is frozen for everyone outside of your train. You still age, you still evolve, but everything around you stands still.
Time does not exist as a concrete physical property the way gravity or heat do. We measure time primarily because we perceive it as humans, but other beings may not perceive it the same way or at all. Thus the passage of time is something of a shared illusion among humans. In physics it’s more of an abstract concept related to several factors, which is why time is relative- depending on those factors, time can appear to pass more slowly or more quickly. This is where Einstein’s relativity comes in.
If you want to really melt your brain, look up The Arrow of Time, or read Hawking’s *A Brief History of Time*.
Every physical law we know (and tested) is time symmetric, especially since mechanics (which is not only one of the fundamental theories, it is also one of the most tested).
Yet there is a very apparent paradox: We can remember the past, but we cannot remember the future. So time is apparently asymmetrical. But we do not know why, as all physics is essentially time-symmetric.
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