What is time

If I ask you to Illustrate time, how would you do it?

Maybe you’d draw a clock or tell me what’s the date on the calendar you’d perhaps even try to be smart and create an alternative time measurement, like a shadow clock,

this is great, but these examples only display ways for measuring time, they don’t represent time itself.

Our cultures have grown so reliant on time, that everyone carries a clock today, if it’s not on your wrist then it’s your phone.

We make schedules for weekly, daily, monthly, and even yearly tasks.

In our modern lives, without a way to track time accurately, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with our daily duties.

So how come the most intelligent people on the planet hadn’t been able to give time, one of the essential factors of life a clear definition?

the question of time is not new; intellectuals have been struggling to understand it for centuries, it was Aristotle who said: “Time is the most unknown of all unknown things.”

Its also known that solving such a mystery would open light on many curiosities in the universe, “Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light” ~Socrates 2500BC.

So what is time and how does it affect our lives?

our science has achieved the most accurate time measurements, going from a mere shadow clock to the atomic clock that regulates the vibrational frequency of the element cesium.

Nevertheless, we still miss appointments and dates.

Our mind ‘doesn’t work like a machine unlike us, robots don’t need to rest, their fuel is brought to them, not by them, and survival isn’t what drives them to work.

If you’re an average person like me living in a decent country you’ll live about 75-89 years of age, and in these years you have responsibilities that you have to take care of to stay healthy, for instance; cleaning, getting from one place to another, eating, resting etcetera:

Sleeping

A good night’s sleep is vital for every human being to survive. Given that an average a person sleeps for 8 hours in a day, that means that an average person will sleep about 229,961 hours in their lifetime or one-third of their life. That’s precious time which could have been spent watching Friends 2623 times.

Eating

Ahhh food, arguably one of life’s greatest pleasures. We love it so much that we spend almost 4 and a half years eating it! That’s 1583 days’ worth of time munching away.

Working

our jobs take up a lot of our time; 13 years on average. ‘That’s 24% of a typical working period of 50 years.

For those who ‘can’t get enough, there are about 441 days worked overtime in a life.

If you add this all together, ‘you’ll potentially work about 4,821 days during your time here.

These estimates are not accurate, but they give us the idea of how much time we ‘can’t avoid losing from these simple daily tasks.

However, I don`t think this time is wasted because we need to do these things to survive, well most of them at least and probably we could cut back here and there.

Time moves like an arrow, with only one direction ~ forward.

However, objects stay the same in a three-dimensional world.

If you leave your hat on the table it will stay there, unless something or someone causes it to move, therefore if you forget it on your desk you’d probably have to go back and get it, unlike the hat that stays where it is the time it takes for you to go back and get it is lost, forever in the past. Scientists call this phenomenon: the ‘time arrow.” which theorizes that time is relative to the entropy that surrounds it, you can think of the entropy as microscopic configurations that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system (such as its volume, pressure, and temperature). Moreover, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated object never decreases over time,

Put simply, a change in objects over time never goes back to the way it was in its former state; this has been happening since the beginning of the universe.

However, recently, we have discovered that time isn’t linear.

Linear Time

is a time that is perceived by the human senses as a referential point that has a beginning and an end, e.g., yesterday started at midnight and ended at 11:59 p.m.

Nonlinear time

Is a possible theory of time where there are no referential points as if everything in time is either connected or occurring at the same time, and all possible choices and timelines are available to you. It’s a theory of time that is present in some eastern religions.

In other words, nonlinear time is something that human beings cannot perceive because it lies outside the scope of our linear perception.

So time can be stretched from me relative to you, it depends on who`s making the measurements and who`s affected.

Suppose we reach a stage where we could perceive the dimension of time fully, similar to how we move left and right in space, in that state you’ll never die you’re always dying, and you’ll never be born because you’ve ever existed.

You could go back in time and visit your past timeline.

If there is such a thing as destiny, and it’s all written then you shouldn’t be able to change it whether you go back in time or not, but that’s not always true because if you can go back in time with your past knowledge then you would know what to do in order to change it.

However, this doesn’t mean that you could save all the people that died back in WW2 in the hands of Hitler, We tend to over glorify over the people that stood out and “changed the world in history, but we put too much burden on them. Because Hitler wasn’t the only cause of these people’s death, and the Germans were so corrupt that maybe they made Hitler, he was and not the contrary.

I don`t think it`s logical to put all the weight of the world on one event or one person.

If you go back to events that occurred say before Galileo, you will find that particular circumstances lead such a man to rise in history.

Such people were just in the right place at the right time, and if it weren`t them, it would probably be someone else that “changes the world.”

However, time travel has other side effects, most notably “the bootstrap paradox,” which is a creation of an object/ information/ person that only exists in a particular time loop.

The film “Somewhere in time” (1980) provides an example of a bootstrap paradox involving an object, in this case, a pocket watch. In 1972, Christopher Reeve was given an observation by an older woman, which it turns out was given to her younger self by Reeve after traveling back to 1912. The young woman then completes the infinite loop by providing the watch to Reeve in 1972 when she’s older. An inconsistency that subsequently arises is how the pocket watch survives countless time cycles while remaining “unaged” and unaffected by time. The problem is no less real for information trapped inside a bootstrap paradox. Both seem to violate the second law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy (gradual decline into disorder) will always increase over time.

In the german tv series “Dark” that follows the lives of connected people living in a small village in which a time loop has opened and caused the existence of a person which can’t escape the time loop.

And this shows how time, a thing that we don`t feel governs our life.

Maybe, in the end, we will discover a new law of physics which allows time travel. Still, now we can only dream about how such a life would be.

In our present time however we can’t afford to lose it, our time is all given to us from the moment of our birth~ we are the wealthiest people on the planet, so most of us tend to throw our time everywhere, on meaningless and temporary things that only last so little, this is because we tend to take things that we don’t work hard to get for granted.

So when you find yourself sitting alone, try to revaluate yourself and set your priorities e.g. if you’ve always wanted to play the piano but you never found the time, look at what you spend your time doing during the day, cut back on the things that don’t really contribute to your goals and give yourself more space in time for things that you genuinely want to do.

References:

http://www.philosophyinquotes.com/time.html#Aristotle:%20Philosophy%20quotes

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-linear-time-of-our-lives/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11390090