( Twelve minute read)

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’

Heraclitus.

At first glance, this quote may seem perplexing, but it carries profound meaning and significance. Essentially, Heraclitus is asserting that both the river and the person are in a perpetual state of change, making it impossible for any encounter to be exactly repeated.

This idea challenges our perception of constancy and emphasizes the dynamic nature of life. The straightforward interpretation of this quote suggests that every moment is unique and cannot be replicated.

It serves as a reminder to appreciate the present moment, as it will never be replicated exactly the same way again. It teaches us to embrace change, appreciate the uniqueness of each moment, and acknowledge the continuous evolution of ourselves and the world.

So does time exist or not.

It’s is imperative in our understanding of the universe and our place in it, is weird. It is an illusion. The experience of time is actively created by our minds. The way we experience time in our minds is never going to match up with the latest discoveries in physics.

Nothing exists in any permanent or fixed sense. Life is a dance between our lived experience of which time is a fulcrum and the reality of existence that we are essentially empty of anything solid or permanent.

Since time immemorial (with no start or finish)  There is no time like now.

Your time is up.

Just what that means no one knows.

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Writing this post would in itself be a waste of my time if the cosmos was that simple.

I believe we have only just scratched the surface of the universal laws of physics; the universe is anything but simple, or is it so simple that our brains cannot grape hole of it’s existence.

There may in fact be something to this crazy notion that the nature of the universe could be turned on its head should the fundamental quantity of time be transformed into another dimension of space.

If you travelled at near light speed for ten earth years and returned to earth very soon for you ,you would need older people and relate to them in a present. Would it follow that time does not exist?

Consider the following scenario:

• I get in a spaceship, and travel really close to the speed of light for a while, and then come back.
• A lot of time has passed on the Earth, but since I was traveling so fast, I only experienced a few years passing.
• So, my friends on Earth are dead, whereas I’m only a few years older.

But what I’m having trouble wrapping my head around, is why is it them that’s dead, and not me?

After all, given what I understand about relativity, it’s just as fair to say that my spaceship stayed still, and it was actually the Earth that travelled really fast and then came back to my ship.

In that scenario though, the Earth being the fast-moving ship, and my ship being the stationary body, wouldn’t it be that I am dead, and everyone on the Earth is just a few years older?

But the earth and the space travellers aren’t symmetric — an easy way to see this is that one of them spent a lot of energy (the rocket fuel, say) to make this situation happen, and one of them didn’t.

To add on to this, lets say the man on Earth got on his own second spaceship and eventually caught up close to the first spaceship and is approaching the same speed as the first spaceship. Relative to the second spaceship, would the increased energy of the first spaceship gradually lower down to it’s energy at rest up until they become the exact speed?

If you trawled through Space time where would you end up?  In a web of invisibility,  an eternity of  mush.

How can this be ?.

The simple answer is that because you are the traveller and therefore have to slow down, stop, accelerate in the opposite direction and come back again.

So this would mean that energy increases as speed increases.

Since time immemorial has no start or speed, it does not exist, either as space time or any other time you wish to define.

Because it appears that the theory of relativity and Quantum can not live together. The two theories are fundamentally incompatible with each other.

This has resulted in two leading “quantized” theories of general relativity— string theory and loop quantum gravity—and now a new theory called the “postquantum theory of classical gravity, that attempt to bridge the gap between these two worlds.

This theory challenges the idea that Einstein’s general theory of relativity needs to be “quantized” at all, and posits that the discrepancy between quantum mechanics and general relatively can instead be explained by unpredictable “wobbles” in spacetime.

Jonathan Oppenheim posits that spacetime isn’t quantum at all, but classical. The only differences, he claims, is that that spacetime “wobbles” randomly, rather than being uniform.“

So it’s important to understand how this contradiction is resolved.

• The exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree these theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Although quantum mechanics and general relatively help explain the universe—at both small and cosmic scales. If spacetime doesn’t have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally.

So we know we need a new physical theory to explain the universe, and that this theory might not feature time. Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct.

FOR ME THERE IS NO SUCH THING A SPACE TIME THAT CURVES SPACE TIME, IT DOES NOT EXIST WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF GRAVITY – GRAVATIOLAL PULL IS A FORCE.  

The different gravitational pulls would force a quantum interaction that behaved as classical relativism would—the particle in less gravity would move with less constraint than the one in stronger gravity.

Does time exist?  No its man made.

Our entire lives are built around time.

Managing in a world without time seems positively disastrous.

We plan for the future, in light of what we know about the past.

We hold people morally accountable for their past actions, with an eye to reprimanding them later on.

We believe ourselves to be agents (entities that can take action) in part because we can plan to act in a way that will bring about changes in the future. But what’s the point of acting to bring about a change in the future when, in a very real sense, there is no future to act for? What’s the point of punishing someone for a past action, when there is no past and so, apparently, no such action?

We have no idea how time might be “made out of” something more fundamental than motion – distance

or duration for example ( which all need time unlike existence)

Our naïve perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Physics without time’.

The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the opposite order when viewed by another.

Time does not exist at any level in nature there is only “now.”

Existence is at anytime, here to day, gone to morrow.

Time and space themselves really only manifest out of their interactions and the web of causality between them. We cannot know the positions and speeds of all the particles in the Universe. If we could, there would be no entropy, and no unravelling of time.

The discovery that time does not exist would bring, not the entire world to a grinding halt but entire universe.

Like all prisoners doing time the whole world would suck.

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Knowledge will always be limited by the limit of the knowledge at any particular time no matter how they may take that knowledge and project theories about our world, the universe and existence itself.

Because all knowledge would exist in that moment is time therefore gravity.

If time does exist then it is in that place in-between those moments of change – causation gravity.

After all time is change and change happens with each moment of time.

Don’t worry: even if time doesn’t exist, our lives will go on as usual.

If we are questioning the reality of time than are we also not questioning the reality of astrophysics and with it the age of the universe along with the age of our solar systems and planet and all that goes with that right up to evolution and with it no doubt homo-sapiens and our existence on this planet and in this universe.

If you were to zoom in to space-time, you would see that time doesn’t advance into the future continuously but in quick little tick-tick-ticks of a discrete clock.

If we accept the premise that “time” is simply a metric we use to measure changes in mass and energy relative to space, it’s hardly a revelation. Stuff keeps moving around and thermodynamics keeps working as it ought.

Whether neurophysiology has a quantum level function from which consciousness emerges,

Time to make a cup of tea.

I feel there’s a slippery slope going on here.

If it’s possible to determine the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years there’s obviously a ‘before’ and ‘after’. This implies ‘time’ Mass and momentum require the concept of spacetime as they are aligned to those dimensions. There is no such thing as perfect stillness so there has to be time.

Energy is the source of gravity, not mass.

Time (and space) emerge, as does mass and momentum as light and vacuum energy had an inner/outer product event which either destroys matter to create light (and vacuum energy) or it removes light (and vacuum energy) to make matter and antimatter pairs.

And this if all matter must be made equally with antimatter (in parallel universes) something “imaginary” must be keeping them apart. Without time (and space) there is no duality, no separation of real and imaginary, no existence at all.

Big bang and black hole singularities are just curvatures we can’t see beyond, they are not the beginning or end of anything, Technically we are in a black hole. Time is only relevant to the person measuring it.

How can we detect something which by definition is not temporally connected to us and only interacts with our universe through gravity or curvature of light and vacuum energy.

So for matter and spacetime we can see, there is no before the big bang, but for the energy that made it (which is timeless) it definitely was.

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The Amondawa tribe in the Amazon, for example, has no word for “time”

Much of Aboriginal philosophy resonates. Much of it doesn’t.

Same with Siddhartha Guatama’s philosophy.

This is precisely why time is such a difficult concept to pin down. As a result, memories are directed only toward the past.  Time has no direction.

In the world of atoms, the laws of quantum mechanics are detached from time: they work either forwards or backwards, clockwise or counter-clockwise; they have no preferred direction.

In as much as humans cannot transcend time. We are travelling in time at 300 million meters per second. Light travels at 3 x 10⁸ m/s but we’re not light, apparently. The speed of light joins space and time

So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.

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The separation of present, past and future are not clumsy constructs.

What is more to the point is what is “exist”?

To appreciate all time at once is another matter. Any associated reality would be one that transcends time. The ‘all time at once’ is the apparent oxymoron to be unravelled.

Just like atoms, we can’t see time, but only look at them.

If time might not exist, we would still have causality, the notion that one thing causes another thing to come after it.

It is doubtful that we can ever perceive a time-less cosmos.

The differing gravitational force on the moon, and potentially other factors, change how time unfolds relative to how it is perceived on Earth. The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon and the moon is only  238,855 miles (384,400 km) away.

Finally:  Its time to rap this post up.   Time is simplicity.  Its either dark matter or gravity. Time will tell.

After all, the fact is that the existence of time cannot be falsified, or its non-existence proven.

Once we understand the quantum universe better we may be able to dispense with the concept of time as an archaic and misleading concept. Virtual time will will have no boundaries dissolving as we past in time.

Exploring the possibility is what science is all about.

In all probability we will continue to use our clocks to measure out time just as we continue to use the terms sunrise and sunset even though we know that is not what in fact happens. It will all make sense in time, as our memories are set in authentic time.

Ironically an ancient Chinese philosophy encompassed the notion of the universe including both all of space and all of time.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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