Hi everyone. I come to you with a simple question.

What is time? What defines time to you?

To me, time is the , for lack of a better term, HAPPENING of things.
I see all these theories of Time as a motion, and the time as a memory, and we can all incorperate that into the idea that time is a happening of events.
it seems like a very basic idea, but it gets more confusing. So confusing that every time i think about it, it feels like I am hitting a block in my mind. Like my mind cant comprehend it.
keep in mind what i write below are just my thoughts and im trying to understand it as i go along.

How can time be a dimension? How can you travel back and forth from what has already happened? What has happened is never accessible again. nor is what is GOING to happen. What happens stays in our minds, but not as a physical manifestation. What is GOING to happen, or the future, just doesnt exist at all because
1. its not happening now 2. Its not recorded in our memory , so one can conclude that its nonexistant.

you can say that we create the future by our actions every second (duh).


we cant travel back in time because the past is not there, except in our memories. We can travel back in our memories but since we have no physical manifestation of it, we have no way of getting to it physically, but only through our minds (again duh) . we do that all the time and even then it would have no impact on the present because it has happened and that reality has been destroyed and is gone. And you cant travel in the future because it hasnt happened yet.

Phew.

i just changed my views on time like 100 times in that paragraph, but id like to hear your thoughts.

im not too knowledgeable on the subject at all. I would love to hear responses from people that are though. Thanks!

I see time as a perpetual number line in which events succeed one another. I would call it a y = x function since it maintains a constant rate and goes ad infinidem in either direction.

The past is merely events that took place before the event that is the present, and like wise with future. We cannot travel back or foward in time because time is but an abstract concept that has no meaning in reality; only in the human brain. The events that happen only do so in the present and do not exist in the past or future. Therefore time travel is fundamentally impossible

We have no visualization or ability to see time, but we are bound by its rules.
The idea of time does not actually exist in the physical universe, however it represents the sequence and relation of events.

its an abstract idea to explain our perception of reality.

Just some food for thought...

Look at yourself in a mirror. It takes light a quantifiable amount of time to reflect off your face, off the mirror, and into your eyes. So you are actually looking at yourself in the past. It is only a fraction of a fraction of a second in the past but it is still the past. In fact, everything you precieve is not happening, but has already happened. There is no present except your own thoughts in your head. Just for another example, it takes light from the sun 8 minutes to reach the earth so we never see the sun as it is now, but as it was 8 minutes ago.

And time "travel" is possible by manipulating the relative rate of the passage of time, but I do not believe simply "hopping" from one time to another is possible because time will always pass at a "normal" rate for you.

Consider this theoretical situation. Say you are on a vehicle that can travel at the speed of light. There is a clock at the point of departure and a clock at your destination and each end of the vehicle has a sophisticated theoretical telescope constantly fixed on each clock respectively. Now the vehicle accelerates to the speed of light. Looking back at the clock you left you would see it motionless since any light reflecting off the clock would not be able to reach you, you are an observer of a single moment in time. Time has "stopped". Now look at the clock ahead of you and what would you see?

This is also an interesting article about a quantum experiment that shows signs that the future can actually affect the present, which would mean the present could possibly affect the past.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future

replace that with "there is present but we just cant see it" plz

So time is a perception. It's like the lag I get while playing counterstrike lol. I get the lag my screen freezes up or slows down but what's going on around me is still happening as the present.

This post was edited by Ruptur33 on Dec 24 2010 08:32pm

you have correctly described human perception of time. now go read some brian greene and you will see how time throws us off in experiments. spooky.

time to me is continuous crossections of higher space that we see moment by moment but in ULTIMATE reality all of time (past/present/future) is all at once but we as human beings that can only experience 3 dimensions of the world plus time see reality piece by piece.

I have once experienced this on mushrooms. I felt like past/present/future was all at once. I felt like if I knew everything that would happen around me and I would just see it happen. I know you might not believe it because of the mushrooms but I would like to feel the same without them. I believe meditation can make us feel this way, it can make us travel into other dimensions because our body/brain/spirit are like dimension-traveling-spaceships. I took no drugs while writing this.

Time does not exist; it was created by man and therefore is irrelevant.