I just read something that prompted this post …
“Why time only moves forward is one of the great mysteries of physics.”
The thought that immediately entered my mind was … Does time really “move”?
Or is time simply a mechanism that allows humans to gauge events occurring during their earthly existence?
Obviously, I’m no physicist, so in the world of Things-I-Know-Nothing-About, I’m sure there is a reasonable and studied answer to my question.
However, in the absence of such learned individuals … what do YOU think? If we didn’t have “clocks,” would we be aware of Time?
You can read more on the passing of time here.
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Image by Susann Mielke from Pixabay
(Why do I think we’re going to hear from tildeb on this? 😄)
Nan's Notebook 
I suppose entropy and decay are the first examples that come to mind.
And of course hunger and wondering when the next meal would ‘turn up’ .
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Or are these simply visual and/or physical qualities that we notice in ourselves and other living things which we attribute to “time” but, in actuality, are simply natural forces?
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If we could travel from point A to Point B instantaneously there would (seem to) be no ”passage of time” in the general sense of how we understand it. Certainly there would be no incessantly whining kids in the back asking: ”Are we there yet?”
And yet, we are still subject to something that is causing us to crave food (nutrition) for example. And even if we didn’t crave it our body demands it merely to survive.
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If you could move back to that moment of space-time when you were hungry, would you still be hungry—again?
Attributing hunger or decay (physical processes) to the notion of time is like the intelligent design argument, ie; there must be a reason for all this decay and hunger. Arguing that reason is time is like arguing for god. Would you have to do that if it existed?
The idea in the article that we are in a different space-time, reminds me of why it is so important to cast horoscopes at birth to record the energies of the universe. The astrologers use this same notion that by doing so one can predict and recognize certain patterns in the future and chart your destiny.
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Astrologers??!?? Important to cast horoscopes at birth??? Tell me it isn’t so.
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Haha. That’s the story. Seems like nonsense to me but there is quite a following. I can only say this, it’s as useful as any other religious belief.
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Whereas a really nice meal is well worth the time to prepare and equally worth waiting for.
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Zero scientific validity.
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I see time as a process, of the necessary things coming together to produce what it does. Everything is in the process of nature. In our world a process is not reversible, Can you imagine a candle burning backwards? The burnt gases of the flame would come back together, cool, then the wick and a match magically appears to set the candle alight. Imagining things is complicated because we don’t think that way. I just heard on Youtub ( his last name is Green(e), talking about the “possibility” of multiple universes and time going “backwards”. Greene said there is a mathematical probability, For me, and in so far as humanity is concerned, there is only one earth and one life. We are damn lucky to be here. Sorry for goin’ on. GROG.
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NO apology necessary! If my readers can tolerate a couple of other contributors that tend to be “long-winded,” surely your remarks won’t offend. 😎
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I would like to hear what others feel about time. GROG
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Hey, Grog. Nan has read this before, probably you have not. A short poem of mine called Playing With Time:
Somewhere in the present
Lies a vision of the future
Understood from the past
Lost in the eternity
Of Now.
Time is but a human concept. All that exists is in the now. But that does not mean the past did not happen, or the future won’t happen. It just means the now is ever becoming, and what we remember as the past can never be again.
As for timepieces, humans love to measure. Where would we be without our measuring sticks? But it is all illusion. And were we to stop measuring, and to start being, we would be so much healthier, physically, mentally, and spiritually–as in being whole persons.
This is my experience.
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If, as you suggest (and I agree), “Time” is a human concept, then technically, the “past” and/or the “future” are also human concepts. Yes?
It’s difficult to get around our human-derived experiences. They tend to interfere with concepts that aren’t familiar.
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Never thought of breaking it down like that, but I guess it follows. We cannot experience the past, as it is already gone. We cannot experience the future, as it never arrives. Even now is just a word to described the momentary instant in which we live.
Without language, we cannot communicate concepts, just sense experience. But concepts do not have to exist to discuss them, nowadays. But obviously at some point in our history, we found the need to discuss them.
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Just a short comment about time and memory. Memory is what makes it possible to live in the moment. You might say there is no moment like the present moment? Getting old means losing it, forgetting. So without memory one cannot control of the present moment. Memory lives your life moment by moment. Time is getting older. Cheers! GROG
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AHA, a blast out of the past, lol, grogalot. Does memory really allow us to live in the present. I could disagree with you, but today I won’t. Being old I understand what you are saying. To me memory was not a part of my little poem, which does give reality to the past. As you point out, the past is encountered through our memories. My point was not to negate the past, but to honour it. No matter, we still live only in the now. Nothing can ever change that… Hugs.
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I was responding to a particular phrase you used… Anyway, having seen a few, time is memory, which means time is life and vice versa. Hugs and cheers, GROG
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✌
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“Long-winded” contributors? 🤨 Who are they Nan!? Let me at ’em with my painful Pedantico-pleonastifier laser blaster!!! 🔫
The never-ending rapid fire laser WORDS are so deadly to the temporal lobe that listeners and readers fall limp, dumbfounded, and unable to form complete sentences!!! 😈 😛
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And your comment has “what” to do with the post topic?
Perhaps the “time” it took you to write it?
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🤭😉 That’s an excellent guess Nan, but I’m not that clever. LOL
However, when I thought seriously about what to comment and contribute, most all comments already made are along the same lines I was thinking so I became a spectator—and I’m guessing you’d say “a long-winded trouble-maker,” yes? 😉
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“The concept of time is simply an illusion made of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening right now”—Max Tegmark
The future is an expectation, the past a memory. “The universe is utterly static”—Craig Callender
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I’ve heard that first line before … worded a bit differently, but essentially the same thought. I lean towards that perspective. The second one you shared? Not so much.
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If time existed it wouldn’t need an arbitrary measurement. It would exist outside of the concept, like god, for instance. If time existed we could measure this exact hairline fraction of a moment. But nothing happening can be measured. It can’t even be conceived in the moment it is happening which is always now. We actually exist outside of time, if it does exist.
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Back when I was out on the rivers/lakes every day I could go, I got pretty good at telling time (within 30 min) just by where the sun is in the sky.
As an amatuer astronomer, I can observe the passage of time as the stars rotate across the sky, when I’m out with a telescope.
So, yeah. I think we don’t need clocks to observe what we understand as time. The universe keeps time for us, as the time we live by is based on sunrise/sunset.
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So, shelldigger, what exactly do you mean when you write you can observe the “the passage of time.” Does “time” really move? Or is it our conception of time?
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Ha!
Ok, my perception of time, I can judge against my watch, if I’m out there on a regular basis.
I will make my guess to about what time it is, then get my watch out of the diver stuff box, to see how close I am 🙂 I am easily amused apparently.
I will say, that our perception of time is inspired by the solar system, and the planet we live on. Which is good enough for me.
Some will say that time is an illusion, and I can’t really argue against that. But my perception of time, like I said, is good enough to last me the years I have left.
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Was gonna write a long, meandering comment, but I ran outta time.
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Ark nailed it is one: time = entropy.
Time is apparently the foundation dimension. All that every was , ever might be, and currently is, (sorry Jim) is dependent on this dimension… for without it there is nothing, now way for either particles or forces to ‘exist’, to cuase effect by their properties. All other dimensions that contain stuff are built on this notion of understanding that entropy – like shit – happens, which, unlike bowels over time, is measurable, knowable, predictable, constant, and enviably regular… which shows us (whether we like it or not… again, apologies, Jim) that time (entropy) is uni-directional or what we call asymmetrical. As Grogalot points out, it doesn’t have to be this way (the math works in both directions)… but it is this way.
Short of a sincere Goddie person answering the why question with an explanation and serious look that God intended it to be this way, we don’t know why. It just is… for now. We call the asymmetry of time the ‘arrow of time’. When we talk of time passing or time flowing or time moving, what we’re really saying is that we take note of entropy that reveals these changes from – yup – time passing or flowing or moving as we consider why… usually while we sit on the toilet and pine for a Reader’s Digest.
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I disagree. Entropy is the visual element. Further, we are conditioned to visualize things that happen and refer to them as “time passing.”
I think you’re limiting your thoughts to the human condition … which is natural. But based on the article, I don’t think the writer is considering this. In one place he proposed that “time is part of the uniform larger fabric of the universe, not something moving around inside it.”
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Yes, we are conditioned – by reality – to think of time itself as a moving fabric upon which everything is embedded. And this reason is because of entropy, a universal condition, that is demonstrated everywhere on everything always. There’s no getting around it. Everything is subject to it. Literally everything. There is no evidence of anything with physical properties able to avoid or even stop entropy.
The author – a philosopher – uses this model of Block Theory to talk about time and possibilities but it is not a model favoured by many physicists who usually criticize it this way: there is zero evidence the scrambled egg can reformulate back into the shell by manipulating time. In other words, the entropy involved with energy is not something reversible by adjusting the time element. So there are lots of good reasons well beyond our visual perception to think of time as an asymmetrical process that goes only in one direction.
I just listened a few weeks back to a podcast with Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate physicist, who is widely considered the go-to guy on matters of time. He’s actually doing work on the boson level regarding this puzzling direction of entropy and has proposed there is a time crystal, making time a thing at this quantum level an oscillation model based on spin and not a condition. This is well beyond my current understanding but I do know that entropy is absolutely central to understanding time as something more than a mental construct we create.
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I’m MOST DEFINITELY not trained or studied in such matters, but … in various and general online readings, I think your unwavering statement that it is entropy is debatable.
Of course, it’s like many other things in science … not every discovery/conclusion/projection is hard and fast … simply because our understanding and learning in limited to the human mind. While that in itself is quite capable of astounding discoveries, our past experiences indicate we are still only scratching the surface.
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Time is indicated by entropy alone because there is no evidence for negentropy. We as humans have no say in this matter. So it’s just the way it is that for there to be ‘time’ requires that there to be ‘entropy’. They are directly linked. Saying one term is really saying the other, that it turns out (remember, it doesn’t HAVE to be this way) that one is identical in meaning to the other term, so I’m not sure how you justify a notion of division… other than as a word game.
Just as a thought experiment, without entropy (because there is no negentropy) how could we know anything of time? There would be no way, no means, no evidence, no alteration whatsoever for there to be any such effect as ‘time’. Everything would be absolutely frozen, completely devoid of energy, an eternal ‘now’ with no means to plot prior to or after this absolutely hypothetical frozen state, terms regarding ‘time’ that simply would have no meaning, as these concepts would not have anything from reality to describe.
So although it may appear to be rather brutish and/or hardheaded and/or unreasonably overbearing to insist time is entropy because all evidence indicates it is asymmetrical, I see no wiggle room around it except by playing with deceptive and/or very fuzzy language. I would love to be wrong here. The idea of time travel is very attractive but it seems the physics indicates it must be unidirectional and only towards entropy.
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OK, tildeb. Not being as “studied” as you, I won’t say anymore. Except that … although Science is our guiding factor in nearly all areas of our existence, like everything else in this world, it’s not set in stone. If it were, there would be no Perseverance crawling around on Mars today.
And please … I would prefer you not write another comment “defending science.” Thanks. 😊
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Just remember it’s a method and not a set of results. So if there were evidence of something else…
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Do you think time existed prior to the Big Bang before there was space to measure?
If there was no life at all, would time exist? Time is measured only by life. It is a construct of the human mind.
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oh lets get existential here. time as Time exists, but probably not the way we perceive it. We use guidelines like watches and the planets passing in the sky as a kind of tracking device. Humans have a need to know where they are, and When they are.
I doubt if any other animal tracks the way we do, altnough it would be very hard to see if they did. I do know I have had cats that woke me up at precisely the same time every morning, even adjusting for Daylight Savings…but that may be cultural and not actual.
We have always been fascinated by the sky rhythms, the way the sun seems to move from one place to another, year after year, but what we call keeping time is more a keeping track of planetary motion.
Everything out there is in motion. Our nature is to give it a name, and try to define what it is. Or why. Or why not.
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That a little closer to the mark. Lets pretend though we have a Rorschach blot. It’s very hard to measure it so we put a piece of graph paper over it and label all the squares and identify all of the major parts as this piece or that. We catalog it and label all the little angles and dips and come to a consensus what each piece appears to be. It is our way of making sense of something, but it’s still just a blot. Like a fish is still a fish, even after the years long study and documents.
The calculus is not the thing at all. Like putting points on a curve and measuring it. But there are no points on a curve. It is completely arbitrary. Time is simply a man made ruler to find regularities using something regular.
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Jim, that is a FANTASTIC question(s)! 🙂
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No
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Haha Mary. No to which point?
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To there being no time before the Big Bang…at least in our universe. No space, to time, until it pops into existence…then it begins.
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There must be some space to measure, some distance to reckon. Someone to notice it
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If our universe didn’t exist at some point in the past, there would be no space, and no way for it to be observed, as it would not be there yet.
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I’m of the opinion that anything that can only happen once, can never happen at all. Cycles of life and death on every level. When it all ends well never know it. When it happens again it will be hard to imagine it never happened before.
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http://www.songlyrics.com/hail-spirit-noir/satan-is-time-lyrics/
🙂
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Interesting … for those who think “Satan” is real.
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Not having had time to read the article, isn’t time measured by the expansion away from the Big Bang? Oh, wait, then time would have to be different for the High Red Shift galaxies, which are moving away from us at an accelerating rate…
ok,
I’ll shut up and wait until I have time to read the article, sorry.
s.
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Speaking of time, I want to post this before I read anything. I am still excited about the James Webb Telescope to be launched this year, but now they are building the Giant Magellan Telescope.
https://www.space.com/giant-magellan-telescope-6th-mirror-casting
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HA-HA! You tickle me, cagjr! That telescope thing is really charging you up, isn’t it?
Nevertheless … please no more about it/them on this post as that is not the post topic. 😁 Thx.
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O.K.
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Wow. Just… wow.
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Science is the only subject I ever failed in my life … I refused to dissect critters in Biology class. I am of average intelligence in many areas, but a moron when it comes to science, so I cannot answer the question. But, what I do know is that humans are the only species that requires time-keeping devices, that demands an accounting for time. Every other species relies on the natural rhythms of the earth/sun/moon to know when to eat, mate, sleep, etc. Humans really have made things far too complex for their own good. Perhaps that’s why they are also the only species that requires pills to conquer stress?
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i have met morons, you wouldn’t qualify.
i failed biology in high school because i couldn’t just get myself interested enough in it.
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Awwww … thanks!
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even without clocks we would notice the passage of time. the sun rise and sun set, the changing seasons and of course people growing from slim to fat 🙂
But i think the debate about time and space are some of the most interesting for me. we can’t conceive of an event happening without time and out of space.
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If time exists, then borders exist. Though I am told I have crossed many borders in my life, I have yet to see one. I can see our manifestations of borders, but actual borders, no, because there are none.
Time too is a manifestation of a moving now, and nothing more. Looking at a watch, the movement of the hands denotes a change, but it always seems like now to me. Entropy? A way to explain a noticeable change in existence, but not proof that time exists.
Being mainly a bunch of atheists, to believe in time is tantamount to believing in a god. Neither one can be seen, felt, touched, tasted, or felt. (I know, Jim, the same can be said for spirit. But I have experienced spirit, I have never experienced time.)
Just by-the-bye, I do not wear a watch, and have not for over 40 years..
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My cats know what time it is. They know because of the movement of the SUN & the MOON. They are, in fact, my alarm clock … I haven’t had a clock in my bedroom for years & haven’t needed one. They wake me up in the morning (very early, but that’s OK) & then tell me it’s time to go to bed (also early). As soon as the sun is low in the horizon & it’s getting dark, they start on me … HEY MA, TIME FOR BED.
Even without my cats, I would know what time it is because I too, watch the sky & listen to the sounds from outside. It’s easy to determine the time of day (or night) just by the light & the sounds. Yes, these things change during the year but at sixty years of age, I am also attuned to these changes. & welcome them!
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BUT …
You say you “know what time it is,” but the question remains … what is “time”? Humans have developed a way to gauge their lives and actions via a process we call “time,” but as I asked in the post … does time really move?
When we think back on early humans, they are much like your cats (and dogs and other animals). They functioned based on their bodily needs, not by looking at a clock hung up on the nearest tree. 😋
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Personality is also memory dependent; would we be us if we swapped memories with another? What is it we’ would be swapping if time is a just concept?
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Let it go, tildeb. You’ve said your piece. Besides, I only offered the post as a discussion topic and to challenge people’s ideas/thoughts on how they see “time.” It was never intended to invite scientific theses.
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From my purely layman’s point of view, I see time as our way of measuring change. it nothing changes, time will be at a standstill. Like time, distance in itself does not exist, its just our way of measuring the space between two objects and time is just our way of measuring the distance between two events.
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Interesting perspective. I like it.
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All of us here are using language, a common language. We certainly weren’t born speaking AND writing English out of the womb. So if ‘time’ were only an illusion, a human construct, then where and when did we ‘acquire’ it from… if not a very real and affective ‘past’? To get from womb to here now means something has changed. Time is a term we use to describe this change using a planetary metric. Figuring out that metric is why priests of old were so involved with astronomy, and that’s why we continue to use this hold-over that links regular planetary data to our notion of ‘time’. From this, we extract circles – the complete horizon – divided into ‘degrees’… 360 of course. Time as we measure it is the frequency of reoccurrence the daily and nightly cycle, and so we have imported this division into using the Babylonian Base 12 numbering system. Hence, our 24 hour clock and 360 degrees must be divisible by 12, the complete bass unit of the numerical system used by these highly astronomically trained clerics.
In fact, it was this connection with time that broke open the mystery of how to create a grid system for location at sea. Sure, any of us can use star positioning to determine latitude and sailors used this knowledge forever. But longitude was a very great mystery, which perhaps explains how even large armadas could miss large bodies of land and even entire continents like Australia. Longitude matters. We measure this by time! That’s a tricky and keen insight. And so we have to have one time piece against which our relative time can be compared to ‘measure’ longitude. This was established in England at Greenwich. Using this time piece and incorporating the Babylonian numbering astronomical system of degrees, go check a map and notice that latitude is given by degrees north or south of the equatorial line but longitude is measured by1 degree from Greenwich (the Prime meridian) relative to time (minutes and seconds).
This application of measured time – that works for everyone everywhere always – indicates time is a very real process. I think the main confusion arises when we start to think of ‘time’ as a ‘thing’ rather than a process. I think the confusion grows when we forget local measurement must be locally relevant using some arbitrary fixed point. Measurement requires some fixed point because it’s all about the difference between whatever – which is why all measuring systems are comparative and so are relevant only using local conditions – and not a thing in and of itself. But the process of what it is we’re measuring cannot be illusory or imagined or some kind of fiction… or it wouldn’t work independently for everyone everywhere always. And it does work.
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Time–I don’t think there is a more confusing topic in all of science. Try defining “now” for instance.
I think this is a common problem as we see things from our ape-like existences and find commonality and assume the rest of the universe acts “there” like it does “here.” But we have found out that time is different depending upon how fast you are moving and different depending where you are in a gravity well. These things didn’t show up for early thinkers because we didn’t have the capability of creating the conditions that show these “quirks.”
Allow me to provide a new scientific principle for all folks to use in such case. Simply put it is: nothing, absolutely nothing is as it appears.
There, that should lessen the shocks we experience when we discover that . . . things are not what they appear to be.
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IMO, you have summed it up quite well without needing to go into a long dissertation on the role of physics. 😊
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As long as you’re satisfied with ‘wrong’ then it’s all good.
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The South African ”language” has three definitions (that I am aware of) of Now.
1. Just now. This means anything from in a few minutes to soon and can sometimes include: ”When I’m good and ready!”
2. Now. Similar to Just now but a little more urgent.
3. Now, now! Means immediately or even before. ( unlike the English version of Now, now, which is generally be regarded as a placatory or mild cautionary phrase.
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No genius here, but my uniformed opinion is that time is merely another word for energy. To get from now to even just one second from now, a certain amount of energy has to be used. Imagine if the universe were a giant clock. Wind up the clock and let it run. When the springs of the clock expend all the energy that was placed into them, it will no longer mark the time.
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Time is a progression..usually in a forward direction. Think of an apple freshly picked and almost ripe. Set it in a bowl and it will ripen, develop age spots, begin to decay and eventually turn into a powdery fungusy mess. It doesn’t work in reverse.
I believe progression is eternal as in there’s no such thing as absolute nothingness, which includes time. It just changes.
I too believe in the multiverse theory and new big bangs pop into existence and old ones peter away to almost, but not quite , nothing. But the energy that is still there, no matter how minute, is combined with more energy and progresses to a new “popped in” universe. It’s just a cycle. There’s never total nothing and never no time at all anywhere, just not everywhere at the same time.
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I, too, could never wrap my head around the idea of a state of absolute nothing.
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Rawgod: “Time is but a human concept. All that exists is in the now.”
From today’s reading:
“Thus, circadian rhythms (edit: a term coined in the 1950s circa – approximately – diem – day) are hierarchically organized, and different parts of the clock system communicate and modify one another, using feedback and feed-forward loops. All cells in the brain and body are sensitive to time of day, and genes (such as PER1, BMAL1, CLK1, DBT, and most famously, CLOCK) activate proteins according to a more or less twenty-four hour cycle. I say more or less because these cells function like a cheap watch – they tend to drift, to speed up and slow down. To regulate them, we evolved a master clock. In humans, this is located within the hypothalamus, in a structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, a group of about twenty thousand neurons that oscillate according to an almost twenty-four-hour rhythm. The starting time or phase of that rhythm can be reset from light and other time-givers (called zeitgebers, the German translation for the phrase time givers.”
“Our SCN is sensitive to inputs from the retina and from additional photosensitive cells on the skin to distinguish daytime from nighttime. It also takes input from various metabolic processes. The SCN communicates time-of-day information to various brain regions and to peripheral organs including the heart, lungs, liver, and endocrine glands. Tissues in the liver ands pancreas regulate metabolic rhythms for stable glucose levels, lipid metabolism, and the removal of foreign compounds from the body and blood (xenobiotic detoxification). So, for example, when we eat and digestive juices are released, the SCN finds out about it and uses that information to regulate digestive cycles.”
Blah, blah, blah. Yeah? So?
Time is NOT a human created concept but a term we use to describe the causal unfolding behind natural rhythms and patterns that simply ARE. In other words, your biology couldn’t care less what your thoughts about time might be: these clocks simply ARE. We can either try to understand them and apply the knowledge we learn about them in helpful and meaningful ways, or we can convince ourselves that our highly limited rationalizations alone suffice to providing us with ‘answers’ that appeal to our musings.
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The following “invitation” was provided in a “New Scientist” newsletter I receive:
THURSDAY 3 JUNE 2021 | 6-7pm BST | 1-2pm EDT | ON-DEMAND
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