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
Because the concept of time as perceived was invented by man. There is no intrinsic reason to define a day as a rotation of earth. If it was never something we noticed and decided to track, it’s existence would be defined differently. So the illusion part comes from our arbitrary way to define it, that definition has no intrinsic merit except to humans on earth.
It’s more like a thought experiment. Time isn’t really a thing that “exists” as a thing but rather a concept in our heads that helps us understand our world. If we couldn’t make memories, for example, would the past still exist?
What we perceive as time is really just our observation of how things move from one place to another. When you ask how long it takes to walk from one side of the room to the other, you are just comparing one distance of movement against another distance of movement such as the hands of a clock. You say “I moved 20 steps and the clock moved 60 steps so I call that a minute. But a minute is not a physical thing that exists independent of other things. Without things to observe, there would be no perception of time.
No matter how close you look at it, this pretty much holds true. Some describe time in terms of entropy. Entropy is what we call when energy become disorganized. At one point, all the energy in the universe was perfectly organized into a single point. Then the big bang happened and the energy turned into stuff and since then the stuff has been spreading out. Like when you burn a candle and it melts away and gives off heat. You can’t take back that heat and turn it back into the candle. We know of no way to undo this which is why time is perceived as only going one way. We can’t put the energy back into the big bang or into the candle, so we describe that as “the past.” Entropy is a good way to look at it, but at it’s core, it is again just comparing the physical location of something (energetic atoms) against the physical location of other energetic atoms. The atoms do not experience time, just physical location. We know how entropy happens, but not why (and we don’t know where the energy for the big bang came from).
But don’t take this too literally. There are a lot of things we don’t know about space and time. There are also other theories that seem to suggest that time IS connected to physical location (the concept of the fabric of space-time) based on the theory of relativity and stuff. For example, when stuff moves really really fast entropy slows down. Does this mean time is slowing down or does it just mean entropy isn’t an absolute time keeping theory or does it mean time doesn’t exist at all? We don’t really know yet. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, because time is really useful for us and always works.
Sorry about the non-ELI5. You may need to understand a little bit more about matter, entropy, and relativity to understand it but didn’t want to get that far into it.
Timeless physics is not something that mainstream physics universally accepts as true, but it makes for good soundbites so it gets reported on occasionally.
It’s also _really_ hard to wrap your head around.
The bottom line as I understand it is that you can describe the entire universe without ever having to describe what time is, so the simplest complete model of physics will not include time, so by occams razor, time doesn’t exist.
[Here] (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7yf42vQYDf8AcH/timeless-physics) is a fairly long and more eli16-ish explanation.
Latest Answers