Was time made or discovered? Does time *truly* exist outside of human mind?

Question

This is a question that has confused me for a while. You hear of physical space and then you hear of time. Both are important to how our Universe works.

But I do not understand this. Wasn't time simply the invention of man to keep track and plan for events, seasons, agriculture, and celestial happenings?

Are we truly moving through time?

Is it possible to detect time? See time? And experience time outside of our basic day to day usage of it?

Answer 1

Time is real but what we perceive as time is an illusion because we are part of space time, we are part of the universe.

Answer 2

Well, it's important to understand what physics is REALLY about!



Physics is the science of measurement. That's it.



What we do in physics is look at properties of objects. So, for example, there is a property of the universe that we humans call distance. We have a standard unit of distance that we call the metre. The distance an object travels from a point is simply given by some multiple of that metre. When you say 'I ran 100 metres' it means 'I ran 100 times longer than a standard unit of distance measurement that we call the metre'.



Similarly, there is a property we humans call time. We have a unit for time called the second, which we define on the basis of an atomic clock. We combine a measurement of distance with a measurement of time to produce a new property of objects we can measure - speed.



SO, the point is that these concepts (distance, time, electric field strength, force, electric current, etc) are properties we humans developed to explain what we observe. They have absolutely no connection with how the universe REALLY works because we can never know that.



If you doubt that's true, then ask yourself what is gravity? We don't know, but we have a few theories. We can describe it as a force. We can describe it as a curvature of spacetime. In the future we might describe it as an exchange of gravitons. All of which allows us to explain what we observe, none of which might be the 'correct' explanation!



I've often thought about what would happen if we ever met aliens. It's possible that they wouldn't have described the universe in the same way we have! They might have some completely different explanation for gravity. They might not even use the concept of time as we do! What we'd find, though, is that if we took their ideas and they took ours, those laws of physics would give us the same answers in terms of what we'd observe.

Answer 3

This question is philosophy, not science.

Define "true".

What do you mean "exist"? Does the number 1 exist? Show it to me.

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I would welcome you to attempt to define "existence" without space and time.

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You need to understand that there is a difference between the thing and the concept of the thing. try not to confuse the two.

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"You hear of physical space..." You also hear about ghosts, aliens, and esp. Your point is?

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Our best model is one in which it is wrong to separate space from time. Our Universe is a pseudo-Riemannian manifold called space-time. In it, how we separate space from time is arbitrary. It is a choice of choosing a frame of reference, a four dimensional coordinate system. Here is a metaphor (a model) for space-time. In classical physics, each instant exists next to its immediate past instant and its immediate future instant. We can look at these as if they are "stills", frames of a film. Each one in its proper sequence. When we play the movie, we see motion from past to future and all seems well. Einstein said, not quite right. Take each frame and glue it together into a solid block. Now, THAT'S the Universe. Once its glued together, we may choose to slice it up into instants any way we want.

So say event A happens in frame 101 and event B happens in frame 102. If you choose to slice it up one way then A precedes B, but if you slant your cut, you can get B into a slice that precedes A! Well, if I told you that A not only precedes B, but A "causes" B, then we have a problem. In this other frame of reference, B comes first, it can't be that A causes a past event! By making "now" relative, we have tossed a wrench into our naïve ideas about cause and effect.

There is no absolute "now". Think about the Andromeda Galaxy. "How it is now ?" has a serious logical flaw - all we can say is talk about how we perceive Andromeda "now". That is, talk about the observations of the light from it, the light that left it 2.5 million years ago.

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Most of us had geometry. We are ok with the 2 dimensional plane, and 2-D figures like lines, circles, triangles, etc. We learned the Pythagorean Theorem, and many consequences of it. Most of us were taught about how space is 3-D, and the rules are a simple extension of the rules for 2-D. So, we intuitively can grasp what 4-D space is right??

(by space, I mean space-time). WRONG! The problem is that we learned that distance between two points (in 2-D) is = √{(∆x)² + (∆y)²} and in 3-D is = √{(∆x)² + (∆y)² + (∆z)²} . And this is true for Euclidean Spaces. If it were true for space-time then the "distance" between two events would be

= √{(∆x)² + (∆y)² + (∆z)² + (∆t)²} and oh how much easier the math would be!

It turns out that the correct equation for distance in our Universe is = √{(∆t)² - (∆x)² - (∆y)² - (c∆z)² }

That "small" sign change has monumental consequences! Euclidean geometry doesn't work.

As x,y, and z increase, the "distance" between two events DECREASES. (You've probably heard that "time slows down, as you go faster" - its wrong, but there is a grain of truth in it.This negative sign is where all of the familiar paradoxes of Relativity come from. (eg the twin paradox).

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For General Relativity it is incorrect to separate time and space. I can choose coordinates so that what YOU perceive as a simple distance in space, I perceive (and can measure) as a mixture of "distance" in space and in time. Time is not useful in G.R. (But we have something we call "proper time", which takes its place there.).

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Time is useful, so I can totally change my point of view and say: anything that is as useful as the concept of time is, must exist (from this POV).

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Time means two different things. A label or a name (June 7, 2013), Guy Fawkes Day 1887... or A duration (a "distance") between two events (eg start and stop). I'll only be 10 minutes, there are 365.25 days (exactly) in a Julian year.

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The matter which comprises us and the rest of the Universe is moving through time, if you use the classical physics meaning of the word. In modern GR physics, time is an arbitrary dimension and the past and future are both as real as the present. Both are dependent on the Frame of Reference of the observer. You must be comfortable with the idea of arbitrary dimensions. In 3-D which direction is "x" ? which is "z" ? Its arbitrary, it is the set that makes the space.

Answer 4

Time existed long before Man appeared on the scene. The only input by Man is the way we measure time for our own convenience and even then, it is governed by natural phenomena such as the period taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun and the time taken by the Earth to turn on it's axis. It may be easier to think of time as the progression of entropy, which always increases and in a linear manner. The British physicist Arthur Eddington pointed this out in 1928 when he coined the phrase "the arrow of time" . Any decrease in entropy locally is more than balanced by an increase elsewhere. In fact. space and time cannot be thought of as separate entities. Einstein was the first to truly realize this when he coined the term spacetime, to illustrate that the two cannot be considered singularly but only in combination. Time cannot exist on it's own and space cannot exist outside of time's framework.

Answer 5

TIME, as such, has existed since the big bang, but to the best of OUR knowledge, WE, us human beings, are the only entities that KNOW about it. Time is a dimension just as is left, right, up and down. We live in a physical 3 dimensional world, with only up, down, right, left, forward and back as the ways we can MOVE within the physical universe. However, Einstein postulated more dimensions, and other scientists have gone so far as to map out 11 different dimesnions over the 3 physical ones we all know about. It all has to do with the laws of the universe, and the added 11 dimenaions resolve some problems with inconsistency in the observatons made.



There are two different ways to look at time; (1) that we pass from one second to the next and the next (the clock hands move), or (2) that we live in a single second (the clock hands do not move), and there is another universe a second before us, and another a second behind us and so forth. Timekeeping, however, is a mere construct of man. The universe has no "clock" as such. As far as we know, WE, human beings, are the ONLY entity to measure time! No animal understands what an hour is. For an animal, it seems everything is in the moment, with no concept of before or after and most important, no concept of mortality. Human beings understand one thing that it seems one else does, that the only certainties in the universe are death and taxes! (joke intended, you may groan if you like)



TIME has existed since the big bang, but as far as we know, only us human beings are actually measuring it as it passes. In a sense, we are IN a time machine of sorts, moving along from the past into the future. It appears to be a one way street. What we CAN do is affect the SPEED with which time passes, time dilation, as proposed by Einstein. Time dilation is that time as you know it slows as you approach the speed of light, but only to the observer you left behind. YOU, on the near light speed spacecraft, would see time move as it alwaqys has. However, on your return to home, you would find you clock was "slow" compared to the synchronized clock left behind when you left. Time dilation has been proved through experiments. A number of years ago, The National Bureau of Standards synchronized 3 atomic clocks in Boulder, Colorado. Then, they sent one east in a high speed aircraft, and another west, to circle the earth as fast as was possible. Remember, the earth rotates at about 1000 MPH at the equater to the east (counterclockwise when viewed from the north pole). So the eastward clock gained speed, while the westward clock lost speed compared to the clock left behind at Boulder. After a few days when the clocks returned, they were found to be out of sync by a small amount. The eastward clock was "slow" while the westward clock was "fast" compared to the clock which did not move. And there is was, proof that time dilation works as Einstein proposed. It does not matter that is was microseconds of difference, but he fact that the clocks were OFF, fast and slow, proved the theory.

Answer 6

Both can work. We invented a way to measure time but most creatures don't care what time it is. Time's always existed, though, since the beginning of... er... time...yeah... But time has existed absolutely forever, and anything with memory can measure it, including rocks.

Answer 7

Times is discovered. Time exists outside human mind.

Answer 8

Time does truly exist outside of human mind. This is easy to see if you know a few things about relativity.



According to relativity, time slows down at high speeds and in strong gravitational fields.

It was calculated mathematically by Einstein, and has since been verified experimentally many times.



This video explains how relativity works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev9zrt__lec



This video explains how a GPS would be off by miles if relativistic effects were ignored:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQdIjwoi-u4

Answer 9

Time wasn't invented by man, but we did create devices to measure it. We didn't create space either, but we did invent the ruler. Time is a dimension, much like the three spacial dimensions you're familiar with. The only catch is, whereas you can move freely back-and-forth through the three spacial dimensions, you can only move forward through the time dimension, not backwards.

Answer 10

Time existed before we did. We simply invented ways of MEASURING time. We did not create time.

Answer 11

We members of Malay amateur scientists club, believe that present Science had already been measuring dark energy at the Periodic Table and Fundamental Constant, but mistakes are constant when Scientists only use 3 of Newton's Law, instead of 4th, 5th, 6th and more of Newton's Law.



As for Einstein's Relativity Theory, the mistake are Scientists at only using 3 Laws at Newton's Law, had failed to notice a Gravitational Mirage in the Solar System, that constantly give "True" results at E=MC^2, only when you had extend the counts of Newton's Law to 4th, 5th, 6th and more, can you be able to bypass the Gravitational Mirage and get "False" results to the Einstein's relativity theory.



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