Time; do you believe in it?

[XHolySmokesX]

A couple of months ago i was watching a documentary on time travel and i couldn't help but dissagree with the theories being talked about, but it got me to thinking about time and the nature of it.

Now this might be quite a farfetched concept to a lot of you as i can't imagine you have seen many theories that say time isn't real, so bare with me and ill try explain this the best i can.


Time is a man made concept, it is not a natural phenomenon. Time was created to allow us to have a grasp of how long something will take to complete, how long ago an event happened or how long it will be until an events happenes. Time is something that can be very easily changed, if i wanted to change the number of hours in a day to 10 and change how long a minute was, with the right knowledge of how a clock worked, i could do it.


My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.

Our conscept of time revolves around the length of time it takes for our planet to do a full rotation, and the length of time it takes to orbit our sun once. This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.


So that's roughly what i think of the concept of time. I want to know what you guys think about time and whether you agree of dissagree with my idea to whatever extent.


[EDIT]

I would just like to mention something.

I do actually have a brain, despite what some of you seem to think!

I don't think that Time itself is man made, thats a stupid idea.

I don't believe that before we evolved there was nothing becasue we hadn't created it, also a stupid idea.

In my first post i was reffering to the concept of time, and how we see time, from a philosophical point of view.

I was stating that if we had never given time a name and concepted it that we might have given it a different label.

It was a huge hypothetical argument discussing whether of not you agree with the current consceptualisation fo how we see time.

 

[Latinidiot]

time is movement. as long as anything changes, time will 'exist'.

 

[bombadilillo]

You can renumber a clock to give it different intervals, but time still exists independently of your labels. It is most defiantly not manmade. Just man labeled for your convenience. It existed before there was mans after all.

 

[putowtin]

wow, deep, and here's me full of beer, chillin' in my back garden and enjoying my birthday!
But yeah time, time has to run and we jump in and out of it (either that or the last 31 years were for nothing!)

 

[baconsarnie]

Time is a dimension that we have allocated measurable units. The standard unit of which is the second, now defined using the properties of a caesium-133 atom.
From what i understand of what you have written, i disagree with you.

 

[GundamSentinel]

Like space, time is a multidimensional thing. We only perceive the present because we only see one-dimensional snippets of a multidimensional entity. Doesn't matter how you measure time, it's there anyway.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

You're quibbling over how we've quantified time, not whether or not time exists. Time, as in past/present/future, not seconds/minutes/hours, exists as a natural phenomenom.

How we choose to adhere to it has no bearing on whether or not it exists.

You're not exploring time as a concept, you're exploring time as a measurement.

 

[ThisIsSnake]

I believe in it because I experience it. You can concentrate really hard and time won't stop. I don't know the ins and outs of time (my brain just ties itself in knots whenever I try to think hard about it) but I think that the only time time will not exist (or cease to be observable) is in the heat death of the universe when no more reactions can occur.

 

[MasterOfWorlds]

As long as you can document a change in something, there will be a concept of time. Most things grow and eventually die and decay. I don't think that this could happen if there wasn't a flow of time.

 

[Sylocat]

There's this thing called "relativity" which disagrees with you, XHolySmokesX. It decrees that the faster you go, the slower time goes. It's been demonstrated, by scientists.

If time were merely a construction of the current state of entropy, going fast wouldn't cause you to age any slower.

 

[Cabisco]

As I read what people are putting i'm pretty sure my nose, ears and eyes started bleeding.

I'll put it in my own shitty simple terms, if I suddenly didn't believe in it would anything change? No. So I might aswell 'Believe' in it as it's a pretty good way to describe things and events.

 

[LongAndShort]

There is a chair about one meter away from me. Now just because the meter is an invented unit of measurement does not mean that distance does not exist. I believe that time is simply another form of distance, regardless of what unit we use to measure it.

 

[Lilani]

Well of course time measurement (notice I said "time measurement," not "time") is a man-made concept. Only a fool would believe that seconds, minutes, and hours are the end-all when it comes to measuring the progress of the universe. It simply makes communicating certain instructions and events much more efficient. You can tell somebody you want to meet them at exactly 2:00 in the afternoon. Without that sort of precise scheduling, where would we be today? Also:

My personal opinion is that, as far as the past, the future and the possibility of time travel go, time doesn't exist. There is no past and future, everything that happened happened in the prescent as the precent is the evolution of everything that used to be.

Are you trying to say present? As in past, present, and future? Because even you seem a bit indecisive as to what word you are going for there.

If you are, then I'm afraid neither I nor anyone on this planet can either dispute or confirm your argument, as time travel has neither been proven nor disproven. I guess that makes sense though: what we think of as the past is simply a recollection in our mind of past things that happened in the present. But then again that could be entirely wrong. Time could be a train track, of sorts--on which if you use the right sort of train car, you can go forward OR backward, if you so choose. Nobody really knows, and as an artist, I don't really care much to find out. Time has served me well so far, and I never like to fix things that aren't broken.

 

[TimeLord]

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

 

[notyouraveragejoe]

You can renumber a clock to give it different intervals, but time still exists independently of your labels. It is most defiantly not manmade. Just man labeled for your convenience.

I agree. To quote The Illusionist: "Time. From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mark it, but we cannot defy it."

It is an independent concept to man. As such...I do believe in it, in case that wasn't obvious.

 

[badgersprite]

You might as well be saying that nothing happened before people existed, because you're arguing that there was no such thing as "time" or "distance" until mankind invented units of measurement. That's right, humans didn't invent time or space; we just imposed units of measurement on them. So, by this logic, the universe shouldn't exist because nothing that ever happened should have happened because time never existed to get us to the point where humans came into existence.

Visible light waves existed before the first human eye. Sound waves existed before the first human ear. There were just no observers of it. There was no way of conceptually viewing them as colours or sounds, but the properties and waves themselves existed. So it is with time. We didn't invent time, we only described it.

Yeah, no offence, bro, but this is the kind of theory I've heard a million times from people who are trying to sound smart, but aren't. :/

 

[Hosker]

Time isn't man-made; ways to measure it are.

 

[TheDooD]

Time is a constant thing yet people see and experience it differently. For one the day may fly by for another it might seem like it drags on forever.

 

[The Serpent]

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

Started well, that sentence.


Since I got ninja'd by TimeLord I guess I'll have to write something of substance here instead of the best quote on the subject matter. Time is actually based on the speed of light (and sound). That is how we perceive the world. If you travel faster than light, time truly does become wibbly wobbly. I am only in my first year of physics studies, but you should check out some of the theories on faster-than-light travel. Then you will see that time is way more relative than even you thought.