does time exist, or did we just make it up?
Posted by Peter Owen | Filed under science
This article, though a little long, is very interesting. It questions the validity of time. Does time actually exist or is it something we made up to measure our perception? This seems straightforward. Logically, to me, it seems that we made up time to measure our perception of something. It is bizarre that time passes more slowly for those moving faster. Let’s take an example: You are in a spaceship approaching the speed of light and spend 1 light year going somewhere and 1 light year coming back. People on the earth have aged much more than you. Now keeping that example in mind, consider this: We (and by we, I mean earth and our universe) is traveling away from something (perhaps due to the big bang) at a certain rate. Therefore if this theory holds true, the origin of the big bang must be where actual time is accurate, but since we’re moving at some really fast rate away from it, we’re aging (and time is passing) more slowly for us than at the point of the big bang. Make sense? It’s very interesting to think about. I hope your brain doesn’t explode.
Physicists have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. In their quest for deeper theories of the universe, some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physics without invoking time, which could help pave a path to a time-free “theory of everything”. If correct, the approach suggests that time really is an illusion, and that we may need to rethink how the universe at large works…
…In the past year, he and his colleagues have worked out a method to compress multiple quantum events in time into a single event that can be described without reference to time Physical Review D, vol 75, p 084033.
via Is time an illusion? – physics-math – 19 January 2008 – New Scientist.
Tags: quantum physics, science, time
