Sunday, October 09, 2011

The Non-Existance of Time

So basically I came to the conclusion that time, as we know it, does not exist. To clarify, this post is directed toward the idea that time is not a dimension. I came to this conclusion because I realized that time is actually an arbitrary measurement. When you think of units of time, what do you think of? You think of seconds, or hours, or years or something along those lines. However, think about what a second is. A second is defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation transition between two stages of a cesium 133 atom. A second is defined in terms of change of a physical construct. In that sense, it doesn’t have an absolute unit. This is really important to understand.

Consider the dimensions of space. 3 dimensions, three axis of movement. These axis can be measured using particles, particles that exist in all 3 dimensions. One inch in any direction is X particles. Fairly straightforward. When I tried to do the same for time, I realized nothing actually exists solely in time. If any particle were to exist solely in the dimension of time, it wouldn’t ‘be’ anywhere. Its possible to come up with a theoretical construct for something that exists only in 1 spacial dimension— a line. But what theoretical construct exists solely in time as we have been taught to unconditionally accept?

So that's when I began to think that time wasn’t a dimension. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If time wasn’t a dimension, but rather a comparison of change between dimensions, it makes sense that time itself would be relative. Which means all experiences involving time are relative phenomena, which gives rise to the theory of relativity. The fastest possible object is the upper bound of time, the slowest possible object is the lower bound. In our universe, the bounds are the speed of light and absolute zero.

“Alright”, one might say, “if time isn’t a dimension, then why is there a past? Answer me that, young whippershnapper!” What intuition doesn’t reveal about this scenario is that the past is actually with us in the present. All your memories, everything you know about the past, is contained in the here and now in your brain. Your brain is constantly changing, taking pictures and cataloging information, creating a representation of the universe that you carry around with you. Everything you know about the past or think about the future, its all in the present. Which means that it’s not required that time be a dimension for things to be remembered as being in the past.

Furthermore, if time isn’t a dimension it solves a lot of paradox problems. For instance, you cannot travel through time because time doesn’t exist, which means all time travel paradoxes disappear. Also the variable of ‘space-time’, as far as physics is concerned, becomes shortened to just ‘space’. Philosophically, existence becomes simplified because you don’t have to worry whether something exists through time. You also don’t run into causality paradoxes involving time, because causality is no longer dependent on time. Time becomes a relative measurement when comparing the change of one object to the change of another. How many times does this oxygen molecule rotate for every rotation of this helium molecule? How many times does my leg flail about per earth rotation? What we think of as time is really just a standardized change comparison— we compare all space change to one particularly reliable space change, and then determine the relationship of different space changes to each other based on that comparison. Thus, time is only as consistent as the change you are comparing everything to.

This is just my point of view on the matter. This is a pretty complex idea, and I wasn’t able to go into the actual logical proofing of this concept and I probably won’t bother to try since there are so many physicists out there working on things like this. So whether I’m right or wrong, I guess only time will tell.

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