Concept of time

[Craterloads]

Maybe somebody can help me wrap my head around this. What is time, when did it begin, is there such a thing as time, what was there before time?

I guess its a bit like trying to understand infinity.

Heard the phrase at the begining of time and thought, when was that then? what was before it. Also when they say god god has existed forever? or the end times etc etc

What i was thinking is there actually such a thing as time or is is just something us mere mortals have created. Is it beyond our comprehension to understand something other than time?

 

[d_brennen]

Time stops everything happening at once. Unless you work at CERN then that's all you need to remember

 

[Theophany]

It was God.

The Bible has all the answers you seek.

 

[Doohickey]

What is time

Time is 8:51

 

[DAnDan]

For the purpose of most people it's just a way of organising when events happened. Started at the start of the universe, and will end when/if the universe ends.

When you get into the deeper physics of it it's a bit more than that though.

 

[d_brennen]

Time is 8:51

It was then, now it's 8:53

 

[RomanNose]

The simplest answer is that nobody knows what it actually is.
It's a bit like mavity, sure we can see and measure the effect of it but we don't understand actually what it is.

 

[PardonTheWait]

Well time is a concept I suppose so we've sort of created it.

It would be possible for some other sort of organism to just have no concept of it at all and effectively exist 'without' it.

I'm not clever enough to think about that any further, so good day sir.

 

[One]

Time is what clocks measure.

 

[Siliconslave]

its a construct we've created to better understand the things we experience.
its the process of change.
its distance x speed.

 

[One]

its a construct we've created to better understand the things we experience.
its the process of change.
its distance / speed.

 

[LOAM]

So what is it ?

 

[Ricochet J]

It's a bit like mavity, sure we can see and measure the effect of it but we don't understand actually what it is.

We do know what mavity is, and what causes it?

 

[Craterloads]

For the purpose of most people it's just a way of organising when events happened. Started at the start of the universe, and will end when/if the universe ends.

When you get into the deeper physics of it it's a bit more than that though.

I don’t get that at all, how can a universe just start and finish. It had to be started from something and when it finishes thing just cant disappear. There will always be matter. For example if the universe explodes, what about the debris? There will certainly be elements left behind, dust, bits of rock etc?

 

[DAnDan]

I don’t get that at all, how can a universe just start and finish. It had to be started from something and when it finishes thing just cant disappear. There will always be matter. For example if the universe explodes, what about the debris? There will certainly be elements left behind, dust, bits of rock etc?

Read up a bit about the big bang. With current theories it's entirely possible for there to be nothing (in the sense that we regard it as). Physics at that level becomes something which is incredibly difficult to visualise mentally.

 

[kwerk]

Time, temperature, speed and mavity are all linked. Once you understand how, things make a lot more sense. I suggest reading about digital physics, holographic theory and entropic mavity. It's the best way to think about it IMO.

I dont think infinity exists either. The universe is discrete and can be encoded to finite information. There is some quite simple algorithm acting on the finite information making it more and more complex (higher entropy) over "time".

So the current state of all the particles in the universe can be encoded as 1/0 bits somewhere. Then as soon as one of the 1/0 bits flips to 1 or 0, a discrete unit of time has passed. The new state is computed from the previous state with what is possibly a very simply program. We call the way it unfolds entropy.

This sort of explains it, sort of.

This one is longer and starts out a bit goofy but get very interesting

 

[RomanNose]

We do know what mavity is, and what causes it?

Yes we know it's the attraction between masses, but we don't know why it exists.
Standard model still doesn't explain mavity.
It's still a very much unexplained phenomena. A few theories like general relativity exist though.
Have a look at the general relativity page, still many unknowns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

Despite major efforts, no complete and consistent theory of quantum mavity is currently known, even though a number of promising candidates exist

 

[MBennett]

Watch this:

Stop at 5 mins unless you want more questions than answers

 

[Craterloads]

Read up a bit about the big bang. With current theories it's entirely possible for there to be nothing (in the sense that we regard it as). Physics at that level becomes something which is incredibly difficult to visualise mentally.

Yes but there had to be something for all this to be made and once its goes bang there must be something that remains.

I think its time to watch some documentaries, saying that ive watched loads of them with Morgan freeman narrating..

 

[DAnDan]

Yes but there had to be something for all this to be made and once its goes bang there must be something that remains.

Not in any standard sense of "something" there doesn't. As I said, physics at that level really is completely counter-intuitive and hard to visualise. It's also incredibly interesting though, and well worth studying.