Does time really exist?

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
William Shakespeare, Richard II.

Time; space; life itself, is a puzzle that we struggle to unravel.

These belong to the secrets of the universe; and the mysteries of the universe, is not tangible, at least not yet. Time: the continuous or successive duration or its measure; a dimension in which events can be put in place and in order from the past through the present into the future; as is abstruse and obscure, baffling and inscrutable, inexplicable and strange, has several meanings. Age, date, duration, epoch, era, period, season, sequence, succession, and so on can all express and imply time.

Thus, it is something intangible but often noteworthy or influential nevertheless. Perhaps that is the reason why so many Sri Lankans are incapable to keep time - for it is beyond their comprehension. Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. If not for time; past, present, and future would merge, and seem inseparable.

Relativity

We would lose our sense of perspective; of relativity. Time is subjective. It cannot be ‘felt’ as a sensation, or an experience. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, music, dance, films, and the live theatre, all incorporate some notion of time into their respective fields. Time is also of significant social importance. For some at least, it has an economic value such as ‘time is money’; and to many others a personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day available to us, and in human life spans. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time.

Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Despite its acceptance as a necessity of life; and an inevitable consequence of living; time remains a puzzle. Time may not be what we think it is.

Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields has consistently eluded scholars. Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers and scholars on the subject. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe - a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view.

The second view holds that time is neither an event nor a thing; and thus, is neither measurable nor can it be travelled. Philosophers have debated such diverse ideas since before the time of Socrates, but physicists are now making them concrete. Time is an especially hot topic right now in physics.

The search for a unified theory is forcing physicists to reexamine very basic assumptions, and few things are more basic than time. One common misconception spread by unclear discussions related to time is that, time does not exist at all. In the best-selling self-help book and video “The Secret,” the authors put forth the notion that physicists have proven that time does not exist.

According to most physicists, there is nothing as categorically and blatantly false as this statement.

Time is actually an integral part of the universe, as much as it is in our life. The universe may seem to be timeless, but time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, a part of the universe. However, the different parts of the universe, exists in different times. The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything.

There is nothing hidden, that it cannot bring to light; nothing once known, that may not, become unknown! Time moves in one direction, from past to present and beyond, unlike memory which moves in another, in the reverse, from the present to the past. “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides: Who cover faults, at last shame them derides” - William Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’.

The phrase, ‘the arrow of time’, was introduced into the English language in 1927 by Sir Arthur Eddington; and then 1928 it became popularised through his book: ‘The Nature of the Physical World’. The moot point that ‘the arrow of time’ flows in only one direction, as opposed to dimensions of space which have no preferred orientation was first set out by him in this book of his.

However, Eddington makes three specific points in regards to the arrow of time. They are: “it is vividly recognised by consciousness; it is equally insisted on by, our reasoning faculty which tells us that a reversal of the arrow would render the external world nonsensical; and, in spite of the first two points, it makes no appearance in physical science.” There is a deeper level to what Eddington says in point three, and that is that “It makes no appearance in physical science.” What does that mean? What it means is that time is all over the place in physics - that unlike at present for us humans, time is reversible in physics; that one could, in theory, move back in time.

Sense

Thus, because of this possibility, time, in a surrealistic sense, and as we know it, is an illusion. We usually think of time as having three parts - past, present, and future. But what is the past? It is only a collection of memories. We cannot quantify the past. We can only remember it; and we can only do so in the present. There is no objective thing that we call the past; it is not measurable in any way; and our only contact with it is in the present. And what about the future? It is also only a mental construct in the present.

We are unable, and cannot experience the future until it “becomes” the present. Until then, it is only a hope, and a dream. We can project what the future may be like, but it will be considerably less accurate than when we remember the past. There is no objective thing that we call the future; and like the past, it is immeasurable and our only contact with it, is in the present. That leaves us with only the present - the ever changing, present. Hence, time is an illusion we created to try and measure the rate of change of the present. It is always ‘Now’; but it is an ever changing ‘Now’. In an effort to cope with the change, we have invented time. It is a handy mental device, which helps us cope with the rate of change of the present; which helps us off set the confusion we would otherwise encounter.

Nevertheless, time, at best, is only an illusion; an illusion to which we have tied our daily life.

The fact is, time does exist; but not in the manner perceived by us. This change which we experience, in the ever present “present” does have a direction, and is influenced by the past and the present. Things change in the general direction of having greater entropy. Entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. That is why when we measure time, we find it restricted to one direction - unlike when we measure distance, which is multi-dimensional. Things are changing such that the overall system has more and more entropy.

Although the illusionary nature of time is the deep truth in this matter, it is not particularly practical. To be totally in harmony with this truth, one would need to live always in the “now” and not be influenced by the past or the future.

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking; keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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