Time; do you believe in it?

[Da Orky Man]

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.

We actually measure time via the number of quantum events in specific radioactive elements. A second is defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of radioactive output by caesium-133. You could change an ordinary mechanical clock, but you try that with the ultra-accurate atomic clocks used for GPS usage, it simply would not work.
Otherwise, I saw a similar program a while ago, and I couldn't think of anything else for days. I had to stop watching similar programs because they were giving me migraines

 

[XHolySmokesX]

I'm going to take a second to put some stuff to rest. I Wasn't very clear with my explanation, as i can see with the amount of people mentioning how i may be confusing time with a measurement for time, which i now realise is what i was doing, i wasn't trying to convey that measurements aren't real.

After reading all your posts i think i've come up with a better way of explaining what i meant:

If we take the idea of the measurement of time as what time is then time doesn't exist. Time, like how a meter is a measurement of distance, is a measurement of change. In this respect Time is a man made concept created to help us understand the concept of change. This then leads to the fact that our understanding of time is as a measurement and not as an actual physical 'thing'.

The idea that time doesn't exist was forged on the basis that time is not physical, and therefore cannot be interacted with in our demention...

I would like to thank shadowsandwich for this video. It was very interesting and has helped me properly piece together my idea.

Now that all the background is out of the way here's my 'updated using physics' theory.

It is impossible to travel from the 3rd to the 4th dimention, which in laymans terms means it is impossible to time-travel.

I believe this for the same reason that we cannot transition from the 3rd to the 2nd dimention. It is impossible for us to take away one of our dimentions, and for this reason it is impossible for us to add a dimention onto ourselves.

For us to add a dimention we would have to bring the 4th dimention down to our level. This is becasue atoms, as stated before, can only decay, and becasue of this the only way to time-travel would be to decay time to a 3rd dimentional level. This act could not be possible as dimentions are not physical, and therefore cannot be manipulated by something within themselves.


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Ps: the phrase "the faster you go the slower you are going" means something different in the context of my ideas. It is not literally saying the faster YOU go the slower TIME is going, but rather the faster YOU move the slower YOUR BODY is working.


PPs: cheers for all the replies, i have thoroughly enjoyed reading them =)

 

[Hamster at Dawn]

You seem to be talking more about measurement of time rather than time itself. Time is effectively a measurement of change. Although nothing changes solely due to time, they would not change without time. Time is how a cause is given effect.

EDIT: Good ninja-ing, there. The below is still relevant though.

In regards to time travel, I don't think it's possible without applying an inverse change which would affect the world in its present state and would not only be highly difficult to achieve but would also be rather silly. I don't believe that time exists so much as a dimension but it's open to discussion and certainly some interesting science-fiction has emerged from such contemplation of time.

 

[Hamster at Dawn]

Clicked the wrong button, I so clumsy!

 

[ImprovizoR]

Time is movement of matter through space. As long as there is something that moves there will be time.

 

[HentMas]

snip

does a tree makes any noise if it falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it?? yes, of course it does, the fact that you don´t perceive it yourself doesn't take for the fact that it still emits sound waves that resonate in the air

taking this basic principle, "time" is a real thing, a "dimension" of sorts, we have a basic understanding of "depth" "height" "length" and every other "dimension" we can perceive, but if it didn't had time, it wouldn't exist

the fact that its a "line" or a series of "branches" where something could or couldn't happen just means that we perceive time with our limited senses, we are accustomed to our life span but what does a life span means for a mosquito that lives roughly from 3 to 100 days? does it means it lives a short life? or what about "dog years"? now lets extrapolate, what does time mean for the galaxy? hell we will be gone before reaching 200 years, and that is nothing compared to the life span of a solar system.

yes, we as humans haven't really got the hang of what "time" means and as such we use it as a measuring tool to make record of "events" that have unfolded or will unfold within our perceived reality, it might be a mystery that science cant (or wont) comprehend, but in the end i still believe that once we actually get it right, who would want to change things in the past? or even still, who would want to travel to the future? at least i am sure that we as an evolving race wouldn't want to "go back" and do "stupid" things like trying to change the holocaust or any other mayor events, i suspect that if time travel is indeed possible, the gov would immediately ban traveling to our young civilization, we have just being living in this world a few years, and i imagine people from the future will realize that time traveling to this era would be completely useless.

so yeah, it exists, its a dimension, its part of what everything means and ultimately its one of the mayor mysteries in our world that wont be discovered for many many years to come.

 

[Beryl77]

I think you don't understand that there is a difference between the units we use to measure time and the time that is constantly progressing forward since the dawn of the universe and it definitely isn't man made.

 

[Alade]

Measuring time is impossible (for 3D beings) so we have created a flawed system (clocks), however it is fact that time is a dimension that isn't that strange.

I think this video explains it best.

 

[Vault Girl]

Time is a human concept, to understand the natural world we must be able to theorize beyond the confines of time.

 

[Snowy Rainbow]

I just gave you it. The eventual collapse of isotopes isn't subjective at all, nor is the directionality. If time WASN'T moving in a direction, atoms would decay or reverse-decay randomly. If time wasn't directional, it would be logically impossible to make any guesses about the future or past without them being absolutely wrong.

Events that happen after or before another don't prove time has direction. That is again human perception. All it shows is that we feel movement requires time; that we we see time as a line. I want proof that doesn't rely on human perception. If all the evidence you have requires that, then time doesn't exist outside of us.

I can't wait for the first alien species we meet that doesn't have time to just ruin thousands of years of our science.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Here's something, though. Whether the numbers are renumbered on the clock or we're on a different planet with a different yearly system, time will always be the constant. You're not thinking fourth dimensionally! You're thinking specifically in terms rather than the concept. The future is what will happen. The past is what has happened. These exist as a clear concept, as the present is the future of the past and the past of the future. They exist, as both something that is happening right now as well as what will/has happened. You don't need to change the system when time is the one constant that keeps it together. The system is man-made. Time is not. Is gravity man-made as well? We gave it a name, measurements, formulas; based on your logic, gravity is man-made, something we came up with ourselves. No, gravity is naturally occurring, as well as time.

 

[Nayr]

Everything has a beginning and an end. If there were no time, nothing would go on inbetween the beginning and end. We assert arbitary values to quantify time, but it has to be there.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

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.

Chaning the unit with which you measure time is not the same as 'changing' time itself...

 

[Whateveralot]

Wait, you are mixing two things up.

This one moment, you are talking about clocks and how we measure time in our culture. Through clocks, timezones and calendars. No big deal there, it's only a method to measure the time we experience as humans.

But beyond that, beyond our senses and well beyond our dreams, there exsists a framework of the physical universe. Every atom excists of elementary particles of which a few still need to be physically found and we are still unable to classify the exact nature and function of each of these particles. What we do know is that every bit of energy inside an atom, will create movement. This movement may be fast or slow. A gain in speed and mass will decrease the movement speed of these particles. It is this movement speed that allows us to experience time. If there were no energy; there is no time. Everything stands perfectly still. But it does not matter, we will never experience time slowing down or speeding up. Even if we were to be immortal; what we experience is relative to our surroundings. If the universe slows down, we slow down too.

 

[Feylynn]

I agree to a point.

-Time is a man made perception that allows us to quantify our existence. In that respect it exists, will always exist, and can be changed by no single being regardless of their power and influence.
Time by any other name?
Time's pace cannot be simply altered by renumbering or renaming. You'd need to pull the sky from above and place your hands firmly on the ground in a valiant effort to halt our planet before you to accomplish that.

-Time is not a phenomenon or realm that allows for travel, but a fixed chain of events that occurs always at a single point.

I'm willing to be wrong on that second point, in fact I hope I am.
The more wrong I am the more likely I go on a ridiculous journey to the ends of existence with the greatest (debate-ably fictional) man alive.

 

[Hawkmoon269]

If time doesn't exist, how would you explain the fact that time is relative depending on your speed?

I'll explain:

In theory, if you were to travel at say 99% of the speed of light, you as the traveller would age more slowly than the people who wern't travelling as fast as you.
Now, that's only a theory because we can't travel that fast, HOWEVER, an experiment was done where they perfectly synced two very accurate digital clocks. One clock stayed on earth, the other was put on a super fast plane and sent flying around the planet.

When they compared the two clocks afterwards, the number on the clock that had been in the plane was lower than the clock that had stayed still. It was a tiny, tiny difference, but a difference nonetheless, because time for the flying clock had slowed down as it moved.

 

[oktalist]

If space exists then so does time.

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.

You seem very confused. Lots of circular arguments. You appear to be trying to use time to disprove the existence of time.

This would be different for every other planet in the universe, including those in our solar system.

But time still flows at the same rate on different planets (if you ignore the tiny difference in time dilation due to gravity).

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.

Aha, a nugget of intelligence. There is certainly something to be said for the idea that there is no such thing as past, present and future, that they are illusions imposed by our ability only to remember events in what we call the past, and that all of time is predetermined.

Relativity says there is no universal concept of the present; it depends on your frame of reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity).

Time travel: only if you could bend spacetime in on itself. By travelling at close to the speed of light you may travel forwards in time but not instantaneously (e.g. take 5 years to travel 10 years into the future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox).

 

[LuckyClover95]

I totally agree, I have had this idea before, but I explained it as "Time isn't an actual THING, just a measurement" so I said it considerably less smartly than you.

 

[Adventurer2626]

SNIP

That's more or less how I view it. To "time travel" you would need a machine of nigh infinite power that could rearrange all the atoms in the universe to their previous configuration. Oops! We forgot to account for the atoms in use by the time machine and YOU. I guess little Timmy didn't need that bike for Christmas afterall. (Disclaimer: the farther back you go, the more important those atoms you are borrowing become; 5 minutes ago it wouldn't likely matter) In my mind, time is like speed. It's real and it exists but you can't hold it in your hand or row up and down it with a quantum boat. It is mighty useful for coordinating large groups of people though. Without it businesses couldn't exist. Yes I see that air violin you're playing. I hope you like growing, killing, cleaning and cooking your own McChicken sandwich. Muahahahaha!