Is time just an illusion?

Outlandish_Existence

I can no longer see time. All I recognize is the morphing and changing of energies/masses/matters. This concept of time we have is slowly deteriorating from my mind. There is no time, all things are just constantly changing? Nothing ever really leaves us... and nothing is ever really born new in terms of energy. So all that we have is all that we have and it never goes anywhere except for changing into differenent physical, dimensional, and material states? So everything is not really passing... only changing. Time will never leave us, we must learn to leave time.

Tournesol

To change is to be in different states at different times.

RAD4921

Philosophers have debated for thousands of years as to whether time really exist or not and the topic comes up often in this forum. I just saw a show on PBS called "The Examined Life' in which the subject was the validity of time. I couldn't agree with you more. I think time is an illusion and since time has such an intimate relationship with space, I believe space is an illusion as well. Time, as we measure it is just a measurement of movement so I believe motion is an illusion as well. I believe the universe is dimensionless and it is a closed universe. Like Hawkins once said the universe is "finite but unbounded". The fact that black holes cruch time and space down to nothing gives me evidience of my theories of a dimensionless universe. This along with quantum interconnectedness/ The concept of universal wholeness points to a universe where geometry and dimensions are abstract concepts. The map of the territory but not the territory itself.

octelcogopod

Time is a subjective thing.

We have of course created "our time", the one the brain creates automatically because it stores memories.

As for objective time, that's an answer I will leave over to the scientists.

Tournesol

That doesn't mean dimensionless.

Novel.

If I crunch a chip down to nothing, does that
mean chips don't exist ?

(crunches chip).

loseyourname

I've never understood the appeal of this question to people. Is length an illusion? What does that really ask? Length is a property of physical objects in that each and every one of them has spatial extent. Each and every one of them also has temporal extent, which means they can be measured not only with how long they are in space, but how long they exist in time.

The Hundred Years War, for instance, occured in England and France over a 116 year period. Spatially, it had an amorphous extent that cannot strictly be referred to in terms of length and breadth, but if you want to speak of maxima only, then it had a spatial length and breadth, as well as a height. It also had a temporal extent, of 116 years. When we ask whether time is an illusion, what are we asking? Is this extent real? What the heck does that mean? Between the beginning and the end of the war, the earth orbited the sun 116 times; that's all the statement means.

That's what time is. It is not illusory to say that the earth revolved around the sun 116 times between the beginning and end of the war; it's a factually correct statement. What is the difference between reifying time and reifying "change" but not calling it time? A physical object need not change to have temporal extent, so it seems to me that the only difference is that they do not really refer to the same thing. Nonetheless, they are both properties of objects, not objects themselves, so if we reify one, why not the other? If we simply want to say that time is not fundamental to the universe in that the universe could exist without any passage of time, fine, but human intelligence is not fundamental to the universe either, and neither are human personalities or human bodies. Does that mean there is a meaningful sense in which we do not exist?

octelcogopod

Excellent post lyn.
But, if nothing in the universe moved at all, would it have a temporal extent?
Or is the temporal extent of a static object relative to the fact that other objects around it change, thus we conclude that the static object also has time?

It seems to me that the lower we go in scale, the more time matters.
For instance, a ball can sit in the backyard all winter, never moving, but a lot of particles in the ball move, thus it is not a static object, it just appears to be from our scale.

So, it appears that the true temporal extent of an object is determined by its complete absence of movement, on any scale.

Thus we can say that any change equals time, it is only on different scales we can say that time does not equal change.

But then again we have the problem of WHY things change in the first place.
Why does anything move, regardless of scale?
And what is the pace of this movement?
To me this seems to point to something else.

Mickey

I don't understand the appeal either, lyn. I truly believe that we should examine questions to see if they're interesting before we even think about the value of the answer, much less what that answer might be. This question is so uninteresting to me that it seems like one that only someone retreating from reality would find interesting.

Confront reality and ask the bold questions instead, unafraid of what the answers might be. What is time? Then move on to other bold ones.

Is our perception of time misleading? I think this one is interesting, because it yields more interesting questions depending the answer. If yes, how? How much? In what way? Why? If not, why not? What if it was?

Answers to the illusion question on the other hand are just a solitary dead end. If it's an illusion, we are all fooled by some mystical jumbo maya. If it's not an illusion then our laws of physics seem to contradict our everyday experience, effectively alienating ourselves from understanding them.

Work on developing questions deserves just as much attention as work on finding answers.

Tournesol

It is a myth that physics in general suggests there is no time. Different
theories say different things.

Mickey

I didn't mean to suggest that. QM and GR each paint a picture of time that is not exactly recognizable in our everyday experience, though. To say that our everyday experience of time is therefore an "illusion" wrongfully cheapens the experience and alienates ourselves from understanding either QM or GR phenomena.

Outlandish_Existence

This is precisely where I have established myself. WHY is change even occuring? What initiated it? And is it truly ensuing? To be universally and existentially extrospective... doesn't the universe appear to be static? As no energy is leaving and no new energy can be created. In a broader perspective; nothing is the only thing actually changing. I desire a deeper understanding than that of which I already know. Thank you for all of the replies, they were beautifully written and I appreciate the energy exerted. I do recognize that what I am trying to define is not coming off with 100% clarity. I am not 100% certain how to explicate it at the current instant.

We will never know what came before, because before never existed. Can we pinpoint the very start? With that said; Is there a before, and will there be an after? Being that time is absent or co-dependent of existence. Sometimes I feel as if we are already in heaven/hell(it's up to us to create), and eternity grabs at me. Excuse my religious terminology... I hope my opinion is not objected.

RAD4921

I got to admit that calling these ideas "theories" was bit extreme. At best, these ideas are philosophical speculations. Most of my ideas of a dimensionless universe comes from the book "The End of Time:The Next Revolution in Physics" by physicist Julian Barbour. The book is endorsed on the back cover by the well known physicist John A. Wheeler.
I am also big on David Bohm's holographic model of the universe that states each part contains the whole. I know these ideas seem counterintuitive to everyday expereince but the eastern mystics often describe having a timeless, spaceless experience of consciousness during deep meditation.
Collective human knowledge is so ignorant of what the truth really is so anyones philosophy is just as valid as anyone elses.

ghostmonkey

Quote by Outlandish_Existence I can no longer see time.

I personally lost time in Northern Ontario, standing amidst the granite boulders. Now I can't find it anywhere. I've even gone so far as to make a bold declaration that a second of time is no more than the passing of roughly 0.464 equatorial kilometers. I even find the notion of the atomic clock ludicrous, what with its circularity: a second is equal to the duration of 9,912,631,770 periods...blah blah blah...of the cesium 133 atom, which, of course, goes through roughly 9,912,631,770 cycles per second in a sufficient magnetic field.

Which means that this can be rewritten to say that the cesium atom goes through roughly 9,912,631,770 of these periods in the relative passing of 0.464 equatorial kilometers. Where is time?

Tournesol

Barbour's Platonia isn't Dimensionless, it is the set of all 3D configurations of matter. That is different to the set of 2D configurations or
4d configurations.

tarbag

I am completely all right with you.
Precisely it is well my problem and what I want to understand. I think it has neither creation of space there, nor creation of time,they are only an illusions.
What was really created with the big-bang it is well the matter and energy.
For more precision I give an example:
Supposing that there is creation of two elementary particles only at the beginning (big-bang) with uniform translatory movement in the two opposite directions according to one alone dimension. In this case the parameter of space is the distance between the two particles and time is inversely propotional to their speed of distancing one compared to the other . In this situation it is not necessary to create seperately the time and the space.
Time is like the integer number. They are in our minds only
I summarize:Space, time and the numbers can never exist independently of the matter.

pallidin

I don't see why some have a problem with the concept of "time"

Can "time" be completely defined? Not yet, but neither is gravity. So do we dismiss both due to a lack of complete understanding?

Look, time is an attribute of "change", and EVERYTHING changes; either with respect to itself or with respect to an outside frame-of-referance. This is an immutable aspect of reality.

The arbitrary parameters we use to perceive, recognize or otherwise quantify that aspect of "change" is what we call "time"
Without change, "time" is irrelevant.

tarbag

Our problem with time resides in its use in relativity. It is difficult to imagine a relative time. As it is difficult to imagine the fact that two clocks moving one compared to the other do not measure same time.This concern obliges us to redefine the concept of time.