The fact is nobody can prove that time actually exists. I heard that first from the commander of the U.S. Naval Observatory who oversaw the operation of the world's timepiece, the atomic clock.
Back in the fourth century, St. Augustine wrestled with the question of time. Here's how he summed it up. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
We know vastly more about science today and physics in particular than ever before yet, when it comes to time, we remain beset by St. Augustine's conundrum. We know about some aspects of time but we're still unsure what time itself is.
Two intriguing reports come from Wired.com. One explores whether perpetual motion can actually exist, powered not by stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time which might be theoretically possible if time actually exists. An earlier article dealt with efforts to find a working theory of time, the quest to solve Augustine's conundrum. It has something to do with "the arrow of time," the feeling of moving through time that we experience and how time probably exists where it could not be felt and somehow that means something or other. If we can only figure out time, we can probably unlock most of the secrets that keep us from understanding our world and our place in it.
8 comments:
"We know vastly more about science today and physics in particular than ever before ..."
Maybe! But some scientists have said that more they know more they realize how ignorant they are.
My personal experience is somewhat similar.
You may like this:
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucius
Kurt Vonnegut's ideas of time seem as valid as any.
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Tralfamadorian speaker: We know how the world ends and it has nothing to do with Earth, except that it gets wiped out too.
Billy Pilgrim: Really? How does it end?
Tralfamadorian speaker: While we're experimenting with new fuels, a Tralfamadorian test pilot panics, presses the wrong button, and the whole universe disappears.
Billy Pilgrim: But you have to stop him. If you know this, can't you keep the pilot from pressing ...
Tralfamadorian speaker: He has always pressed it, and he always will. We have always let him, and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.
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Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 (the children's crusade)
Kurt Vonnegut, we should not waste Mound's 'TIME' with long comments. ;)
LD, how can anyone waste what no one can prove exists much less what it might actually be?
Mound, I was just kidding. I have this bad habit of kidding.
The time may not exist but without its use our world will be a chaos.
No, LD, I knew you were kidding. I got it. I wasn't serious either.
What is it? Dunno. But the question of whether time "really exists" has always struck me as pretty stupid. Some physicists are mistaking a semantic question for a question about reality. Of course time exists. It may or may not be the kind of thing physicists have tended to think of it as being, e.g. fundamental, dimension-like etc.; it might be an emergent property of something else, or who knows what all. It might look quite different from some different perspective, yadda yadda.
But none of that stops time from existing. It's like saying a rock doesn't "exist" when you find out it's mostly emptiness between tiny atoms rather than being a single solid thing as you'd previously thought--nope, the rock still exists. Kick it. See?
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