This is a very philosophical article, asking the question: What is time? I always wonder about time, and this article is based on some of the thoughts that I wanted to share with others.
I glance at the clock on the wall and think to myself, it is 6:35, my bus leaves in 7 minutes, and I am still getting dressed. I am going to be late for work. I hurry myself, loose another few minutes putting on my shoes and my jacket, and I am out the door, walking faster than usual, making sure I won't miss my bus. Luckily, the bus is always there at the same exact time, every day, from Monday through Friday. Twenty five minutes later, I am in the office, at my desk, going through my email. This routine repeats every day. My day, every day is built around the clock. Time dictates my life in many ways. It tells me when to get up for work, when to leave, when to eat, play, sleep, and on and on. So I think to myself, what is time really? Does it exist, or is it a mechanism which was developed in us, during the millions of years of evolution. Would time still have a meaning if we were all demi-gods, and had an infinite life-span?
I always had easier time dealing with subjects like extra dimensions, singularities, black holes, and other weirdness commonly present in particle physics, than I had with time. It is such an elusive subject, and yet it is so painfully obvious that everything in our world is built around time. Time and us people are inseparable, and without it, we are at a loss, literally. Everything, from the minute you are born to the minute you die is connected with time. The trouble I always have with time is not the fact that I never seem to have enough, but the very meaning and purpose behind it. Unlike physical dimensions of our world, the three dimensions of space, which are quite easily observed, time is very much a perceived notion. It is something that we use to measure some finite events, like our Earth making one full rotation around its axis, and around the sun, or the light from the sun and other more distant stars traveling towards earth, a river carving its channels through the land, and so forth.
Time appears to be very real to us. As an event occurs, we have absolutely no ability to replay, and introduce changes to that event; there is no turning back the clock. This is a simple proof of directionality and presence of time. So we can prove that it is there, and we can only travel forward in time, and not back. But what is it? Is it more than just a tool that we use to mark beginning and end? To make things worse, one well known man, Albert Einstein came up with a theory, which basically says that time is not always static. In other words, it is capable of slowing down or speeding up relative to its observer, depending upon the speed at which the observer is traveling. This always made me wonder why then we are so intimately attached to some measure, which is fluid, not fixed, almost invisible, yet so clearly prohibitive in forcing us to only move forward. Does it have anything to do with the fact that everything in our life has a definite beginning and end?
One thing that every living being has in common is birth and death, the moment when our clocks start, and when they stop. Mortality is at the core of our being, and time is one way for us to track our progression from start to finish. Everything we know in this world has a finite start and end, even the Universe itself. If you go far back in time, you get to the point when our universe was at t=0, the very beginning of time as we understand it. An exciting moment to be sure. So what if our (human) existence started at t=0? If you are a Star Trek fan, you probably heard about the Q, a race of intelligent life that was always there, according to the show. The question that I asked myself was: "What if we, were like the Q, always there, from t=0?" We would exist on a different plane from the rest of normal "observable" space, and our existence would not be influenced by material developments in the universe. Surely, time would be much less meaningful to us then, since we would have no knowledge of death. We would have certainly developed very differently, since eternity itself would be at our full disposal. Society, as we know it would likely never develop, because we would have no way to evolve other than to gain knowledge from changes that occur naturally over the millennia. Genetic development and diversity, the very meaning of life, would never exist without time playing a part. But, event if we did live for ever, we would eventually begin observing changes in the universe itself. We would see stars burnout, galaxies dance in a deadly game of gravity and merge eventually. Granted, these changes would be painfully slow, occurring over millions of years, but to a being with an infinite life-span even minute changes become very observable when enough time passes. So it seems there is no getting away from it. Even if we always "were", time would still be observable, only from a very different perspective, and on a much greater scale.
I suppose I did answer my own questions in part. While rather mysterious, and intriguing, time is clearly a physical property of our "known" universe. It is fair to say that time is not just something that we created, but more likely something that we began observing directly at first, at the dawn of mankind, and continued to observe it directly, and indirectly, as a mechanism to track changes all around us. It is hard to imagine a life where time itself is not a driving force behind everything. As humans, we know that our clock will run out, sooner or later. This body clock, so to speak, is what takes us through our progressions, and time itself influences our development and evolution. One question that remains unanswered in my own mind, is what really happens when time actually stops, at the point where physics break down, like the Back holes. I think a definite answer to this question will give us a completely different view, and understanding of time. Until then, we can still wonder, and guess, after all, it is just a matter of time!
Bookmark this story with del.icio.us
Digg this story
Furl this item
Have you Reddit?