Time. Does it really exist and what does it really mean to us human beings?
Time is something that is talked about, debated and misunderstood by many. However, time is also a very important part of our life as it continues on no matter what we do.
From the very beginnings of human existence, humans have noticed that time continues forward at the same pace, no matter what occurs. Night follows day, day follows night, the seasons change, the moon changes its appearance and people age. No matter how much people wished and hoped, events continued to move forward at the same pace. The rich, the powerful and even the mighty have tried to slow down time to stop from aging or to enjoy a moment more intensely, but this has not been possible. The only thing people have been able to do is to quantify time so that they do not waste what time on Earth they have.
By watching the weather change, our earliest ancestors were able to figure out the best time to plant and harvest food as well as when migratory animals would be around for them to hunt. Eventually people noticed that these seasons usually happened at pretty regular intervals and managed to come up with calendars that marked when the seasons began. They eventually based calendars on the number of times they saw the moon and broke each period into months. This evolved over hundreds of years into the calendars we now know of today because people figured out that the Earth revolves around the Sun on a regular basis, what we now call a “year” and that this time can be broken down into smaller units; months, weeks and days. Days can be further broken down into smaller sub-sets of hours, minutes and seconds. Even seconds can be broken down further into smaller and smaller units. With this quantification of time, people looked for different ways to measure time and inventors of all kinds have worked on the idea over the centuries.
An enormous amount of inventions have come out of humanity’s obsession with trying to measure time; watches, clocks, sextants, hour glasses, sun dials, and many, many more. However, all of these inventions, even our modern day atomic clocks, do not actually measure time. This is probably the most important thing to know about time and is generally misunderstood by many so I will write it again as plainly as possible: nothing measures time.
Now I know what you are thinking. How is that possible? Our current atomic clocks are said to be incredibly accurate recorders of time. Scientists around the world swear that the atomic clocks currently in use can “keep time” for thousands of years without needing to be readjusted. This is in contrast to early watches that had to be corrected constantly as the mechanism inside was made of metal that tended to fatigue or was affected by outside elements or were not maintained on a regular basis. However, these atomic clocks do not measure time; they measure the microwave vibrations that come from an isotope (usually cesium) that has been found to give off vibrations at a consistent and measurable way. This signal comes off as a “pulse” that can then be measured by the atomic clock. The pulses that come off the isotope have already been measured to see how much time occurs between them, so all the clock needs to do is count the pulses and then, since it knows how many of these pulses are in a second (In the case of cesium, there are 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second![1]), it calculates the seconds, minutes and days as they go by. This is not measuring time; it is a machine counting vibrations!
Even so, scientists seem to have come up with the idea that these atomic clocks can actually measure time much like you can measure the speed of a river by dropping a device like a waterwheel into it. Atomic Clocks do not do this; they do not interact with the flow of time they only count pulses. Changes in these pulses do not show a change in the flow of time any more than pulling a battery out of your watch stops time. However, scientists have run experiments with atomic clocks to “show” changes in the flow of time.
In one famous experiment in 1971 by J.C. Hafele and R.E. Keating of the U.S. Naval Observatory[2], two atomic clocks, both perfectly in sync with one another at the beginning of the experiment, are put in two different situations. One clock is put on an airplane and another is left on the ground. The one on the airplane is flown around the world for three days, refuelling in mid-air so as to keep a constant speed. After the one on the airplane is brought back to the ground, both clocks are compared to one another and the clock that flew on an airplane is nanoseconds (which is one billionth or 10-9 of second!) behind the one that remained on the ground when the plane flew east and was nanoseconds fast when the clock was flown in a westerly direction. This is now sited as “proof” that time slows down the faster you go relative to another object[3].
However, is this actually proof of a change in time itself?
However, is this actually proof of a change in time itself?
No, I am afraid not.
Since atomic clocks do not actually measure time, just the vibrations of an isotope, many other explanations can be made for the change in “time” from one clock to another. For example, the change in altitude could explain the slight discrepancy, a change in temperature, a change in air pressure, changes in gravity[4] the extra pull of gravity that the airplane pulled as it took off, changes in humidity, etc. Any of these explanations can account for the slight discrepancy from one clock to another, and can even give the “Ether Theory”[5] a second life. Unfortunately scientists have taken this experiment as proof that atomic clocks measure time and that time slows down the faster you move.
Now, there are moments when time seems to slow down. In a car accident, your first kiss, waiting for the weekend to start, etc., but time does not actually slowdown in these examples, just your perception of it does. Scientists tend to believe that your mind is actually paying more attention in moments like this and hence, you live those moments in more detail than you would say, just eating breakfast.
However, this change in perception is not “proof” of time running at different speeds and neither are discrepancies in atomic clocks. In fact, if time really did run at different speeds, we should be able to see the effects. Pictures of outer space would have sections that were “warped” and the stars would look “smudged” as light travelled through sections of space where time ran at a different speed. As you walked through a city, you would notice people and objects moving at different speeds, just like you see fireworks go off before you hear the sound. Everything around you would be disjointed and hard to understand if time really was as flexible as scientists make it out to be.
So, is time really the 'flowing river' that scientists would have you believe? Is time as an object that can be detected or captured? No.
So what is time?
Time is a human construct made to keep track of events and to explain why things happen in the order that they do.
Think of it like the point in space where the two blades of scissors meet and do the cutting. There is a definitive point in space where the two blades meet but nothing is actually there.
So, is time really the 'flowing river' that scientists would have you believe? Is time as an object that can be detected or captured? No.
So what is time?
Time is a human construct made to keep track of events and to explain why things happen in the order that they do.
Think of it like the point in space where the two blades of scissors meet and do the cutting. There is a definitive point in space where the two blades meet but nothing is actually there.
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