Does Time Really Exist? Yes Or No?

[GoldenArmz]

whats thinking about this yesterday after reading some info online from a guy Name OSHO (he is this sort of guru). he claims that time is simply a illusion and we categorize it as chronological, etc.

 

if this is the case and time doesnt exist. what does that make death? and what i mean by that is everything expires or has a time.

 

am im wrong guys?

[Pmb]

whats thinking about this yesterday after reading some info online from a guy Name OSHO (he is this sort of guru). he claims that time is simply a illusion and we categorize it as chronological, etc.

What he claims is wrong. He doesn't know what he's talking. Nor does anyone who claims that time does not exist. There are more than one states of the universe. This phenomena is what we describe with the concept of time. To say that time is an illusion means that there is only one state of the universe and that nothing ever changes and that's emperically wrong.

 

am im wrong guys?

Your premise is wrong making you wrong as well.

[Aethelwulf]

whats thinking about this yesterday after reading some info online from a guy Name OSHO (he is this sort of guru). he claims that time is simply a illusion and we categorize it as chronological, etc.

 

if this is the case and time doesnt exist. what does that make death? and what i mean by that is everything expires or has a time.

 

am im wrong guys?

 

 

Well, I can shed some light to your understanding of the subject and it is complicated - I'll try and keep the math at a minimum.

 

It appears that it is Global Time which doesn't exist within General Relativity. We get some idea that this is the case when we quantize the General Relativistic equations describing the universe; the result is the timelessness of relativity - the time derivative of the Hamiltonian which describes the universe effectively is zero

 

[math]H \psi = 0[/math]

 

On the right handside, it should look like the normal Schrodinger equation, but it doesn't end up this way, instead we are told that this translates as there being no cosmological time.

 

Pmb is quite correct, stating that changes are what we use to measure time; time however is an absraction, it isn't actually a real artefact of the world. Time is merely a tool an intelligent recording device uses to order chronological happenings. Time however isn't physical nor is it even treated in quantum mechanics as an observable or even better yet, it has no non-trivial operator.

Edited December 5, 2013 by Aethelwulf

[GoldenArmz]

Well, I can shed some light to your understanding of the subject and it is complicated - I'll try and keep the math at a minimum.

 

It appears that it is Global Time which doesn't exist within General Relativity. We get some idea that this is the case when we quantize the General Relativistic equations describing the universe; the result is the timelessness of relativity - the time derivative of the Hamiltonian which describes the universe effectively is zero

 

[math]H \psi = 0[/math]

 

On the right handside, it should look like the normal Schrodinger equation, but it doesn't end up this way, instead we are told that this translates as there being no cosmological time.

 

Pmb is quite correct, stating that changes are what we use to measure time; time however is an absraction, it isn't actually a real artefact of the world. Time is merely a tool an intelligent recording device uses to order chronological happenings. Time however isn't physical nor is it even treated in quantum mechanics as an observable or even better yet, it has no non-trivial operator.

 

so in your assertion would you consider it to be a half-truth

[SaxonViolence]

Don't some respectable Physicists picture the Universe as a Deterministic 4-D object that reaches from the remotest antiquity to the remotest futurity?

 

In a very real way, everything would always be happening and "Time" would only be that illusion of movement we get when we take a 3-D Section and move it from "Left to Right"?

 

A few years ago I remember there was some question as to why we can remember the past but not the present.

 

Scientists said there has to be some valid reason, since we don't...

 

But that they'd yet to uncover the reason.

 

 

Saxon Violence

[Aethelwulf]

so in your assertion would you consider it to be a half-truth

 

It's true in our modern concept of General Relativity, where world lines are static and the quantum interpretation of existence is rather a fleeting existence of beginnings and ends, starts and stops. Time isn't a river flowing from the past to future, it isn't linear in the sense of Newtonian physics.

[Pmb]

Pmb is quite correct, stating that changes are what we use to measure time; time however is an absraction, it isn't actually a real artefact of the world. Time is merely a tool an intelligent recording device uses to order chronological happenings. Time however isn't physical nor is it even treated in quantum mechanics as an observable or even better yet, it has no non-trivial operator.

That’s not the way I see it. I never said nor intended to imply that changes are what we use to measure time since it’s backwards. Time is the phenomena of the changes in the state of the universe. We describe that phenomena with time just as we describe space with distance.

[phision]

Read the nature of time it contains some views and thinking, RE: TIME, and also contains links to other time related threads! Watch out for Julian Barbour in the video near the end of thread, he may offer some of the clearest timeless thinking around!

[IliasTyrovolas1]

Time is just the fourth dimension of ours humanmade reference frame.Therby it can not be expanded or bent.

[pgrmdave]

Define time before asking whether or not it exists.  (for that matter, define "exists".  Does "up" exist?).

Time, as far as I can determine, involves the tendency for interactions between matter and energy to have an effect on other matter and energy in one "direction" and not the other - defining an "arrow of causality".  

[CraigD]

Welcome to hypography, Elias! :) Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

 

Time is just the fourth dimension of ours humanmade reference frame.Therby it can not be expanded or bent.

This view – I’d call it Minkowski spacetime – is certainly a useful definition of time, and I’d say one of or the most dominant one in the physics know to anyone alive today.

 

However, saying time is “just” the 4th dimension, in addition to the usual 3 spatial ones, ignores that it’s very unlike the spatial ones: rigid objects can be rotated through the 3 spatial dimensions with arbitrarily little energy, but not thought the 4th, temporal dimension. For a longer discussion of this, see this 2005 thread.

[pgrmdave]

The study of Time in Physics is endlessly fascinating.  That being said, I theorize that higher beings may be able to create, skip, pause, or modify Time at will.  I believe this is a higher form of Universal Physics, yet to be learned...

 

-Dicequa Dustin

Do you have any evidence for this, or is this just musings in your head without any measurable effect in actual existence?

Edited December 15, 2014 by pgrmdave

[LeRepteux]

Instead of only being helpful to our movements' measures, what if precise timing at a micro level would rather be causing these movements? I show here how it could be the case. Wouldn't that perspective add a bit of materiality to our concept of time?

Edited December 27, 2014 by LeRepteux

[Lucious]

Welcome to hypography, Elias! :) Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

 

This view – I’d call it Minkowski spacetime – is certainly a useful definition of time, and I’d say one of or the most dominant one in the physics know to anyone alive today.

 

However, saying time is “just” the 4th dimension, in addition to the usual 3 spatial ones, ignores that it’s very unlike the spatial ones: rigid objects can be rotated through the 3 spatial dimensions with arbitrarily little energy, but not thought the 4th, temporal dimension. For a longer discussion of this, see this 2005 thread.

 

 

One of those differences is that time isn't even an observable. From a quantum point of view, there is no non-trivial operator for time either. 

 

Don't some respectable Physicists picture the Universe as a Deterministic 4-D object that reaches from the remotest antiquity to the remotest futurity?

 

In a very real way, everything would always be happening and "Time" would only be that illusion of movement we get when we take a 3-D Section and move it from "Left to Right"?

 

A few years ago I remember there was some question as to why we can remember the past but not the present.

 

Scientists said there has to be some valid reason, since we don't...

 

But that they'd yet to uncover the reason.

 

 

Saxon Violence

 

 

This is the thing, there is no true directionality in space, the so-called ''arrow of time,'' arises from a psychological deception of there being past states and future states. 

 

There can only ever be a present state. 

 

If you made a journey into space, there is no concept of up, down, left or right, so conceptually there is no arrow in space to tell us where everything came from - not even one telling us where we are going, time is really a non-linear subject, it's not part of real space which belong to a set of observable positions. 

 

Even though everything moves relative to everything else, no one can absolutely be sure when events happen, which means that our universe is a lot stranger and doesn't satisfy the Newtonian linear view of time. 

[BrettNortje]

Isn't time a measurement of reactions up until that point, and any further reactions on your sun dial of some sort will measure further reactions between cosmic bodies? there are at this point no actions, only reactions, resulting in equal reactions, as energy changes forms.

 

With that in mind, we can agree change is good, yes? just kidding, but, the standard for reactions taking place is measured by the heartbeats we have, or the energy exerted to get from place [a] to place . time is reactions, or, change if you will.

[Eclogite]

I have long considered that I am not nearly smart enough to understand the nature of time. I suspect I am smart enough to recognise that no one else is either. (Of course, I could be wrong.) But it does amuse me to see the amateurs and the professionals trying to understand it. One day someone will succeed. In time.

[CraigD]

As with most other subjects, my approach to the question “does time really exist” is utilitarian.

 

Presented with questions like “given the following initial physical conditions, what will happen”, or conversely, “given these initial conditions, and these which you may specify, what initial conditions are required to get this to happen” (for example, calculating how to get a spacecraft from one place to another), I almost always use arithmetic, and almost always have a numeric variable of unit type “time” and “distance”. I simply can’t conceive of or recall seeing an alternative to using these concepts. So, pragmatically, time really, conceptually, exists for me.

 

The only time I find myself entertaining the concept that “time really doesn’t exist”, or is something very different than what I represent numerically answering questions of the kind I describe above is when I’m posed with questions like (to borrow a phrase from a mysteriously missing upthread post) “how can you create, skip, pause, or modify Time at will?”, or more concrete questions like “how can you travel or send a message into your past using arbitrarily little energy?” or “how can you travel to your future other than simply waiting?” In neither of these kinds of questions have I found it useful to discard arithmetic or a time variable. Rather, I’m forced to postulate a phenomena I’m uncertain is possible, such as matter with negative gravitational mass or bodies that travel faster than the speed of light.

 

I’d be delighted if someone could show me a use for discarding time variables, such as finding with a finite number of calculations an exact solution for the motion under gravity of 3+ bodies, but so far, nobody has. In my experience, people (let’s call them Bob) who propose discarding the concept of time usually propose that some person (let’s call this person Alice) other than they could, if the accepted their proposal, do such delightful calculations. I’ve never seen a case where Bob was able to tell Alice how to take the critical a first steps in eventually performing such a calculation.