The Illusory Nature of Time: II
“And there we were, all in one place
- a generation lost in space,
with no time left to start again.”
Don McLean, ‘American Pie’.
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Summary
For thousands of years sages and mystics have been telling us that time is an illusion.
Recently scientists discovered that at levels below Planck Time, even the concept of time drops off the scientific agenda.
Here, in very simple terms, is an explanation for why that is. As an objective cosmic reality, time literally does not exist.
Confused? You won’t be – read on …
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Taking a Step Backwards
Picture the scene: broken glass littered all over the floor, small orange thing flapping around on soaking wet carpet. Suddenly glass, water, orange thing lift off the ground and leap towards the table, assembling themselves as a goldfish swimming in a bowl – just as a cat leaping in backwards through the window brushes past the goldfish bowl, off the table and out through the door in reverse gear.
Couldn’t happen? Course it couldn’t, the universe isn’t built that way.
| Then what way is the universe built, if the total matter and energy content is identical at both ends of that little episode but it can only happen in one direction? What is this ‘arrow of time’? |
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That one’s actually quite simple. Imagine a bag full of grasshoppers: open the bag, and in no time the little critters are everywhere, heading in every direction. Reversing the process, getting them back into the bag, would be nigh on impossible. It certainly wouldn’t happen by chance.
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The material universe is made up of energy, every bit of which is a good deal livelier than those grasshoppers. Some of that energy is tied up as bundles that we refer to as ‘particles’ – the particles that make up you and me and everything else. The rest is flying about as light, radio waves, microwaves and the like.
All of the effects of time are driven by that energy escaping – just like those grasshoppers. |
Every physical or chemical reaction, including those in biological processes, involves energy transfers in which some of that energy gets away. The nuclear reactions in stars are driven by the release of energy, the energy that comes to us as heat and light from the sun. Scientists call this increasing entropy, also The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
That lost energy scatters in every direction, making the reverse process about as likely as all those grasshoppers obligingly stepping back into that bag. [Reversing one of those reactions requires more energy, so there’s always a net energy loss.] The one-way street of time is the route taken by those grasshoppers and that energy alike: out, never back in; scattering, never regrouping.
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… And One More Time Around …
Numerous studies point to particles of matter being light wrapped round in closed loops. The book Tapestry of Light shows how this precisely fits a whole spread of proven scientific facts. Here, too, some of that steadily circulating energy can be released ‘into the wild’ by one-way reactions – such as two atoms joining to form a molecule, releasing some of the electron energy from each of those atoms.
So there we have the flow of time. It’s actually those energy flows, scattering randomly from events that thus can’t run in reverse (since they’d need a random focused input of energy – a contradiction) or circulating round to form material particles. The rate of those energy flows – the speed of light – defines the rate of time.
Or does it? Let’s take a closer look.
Anything You Can Do …
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If the rate of those energy flows doubled, then energy would get from A to B twice as fast, it would disperse from chemical reactions and nuclear fusion events twice as fast.
But it would also circulate around particles, atoms and molecules, twice as fast … |
And that’s what gives us our measure of time, whether it’s an atomic clock or marks on a burning candle – or even the synapses in your brain or mine, giving us an estimate of time. The faster rate of external events would be precisely balanced by the faster rate of every measure of time that you can imagine, including our own perception. If something happens twice as fast, and your clock runs twice as fast, you won’t notice the difference.
Those energy flows* could speed up by a hundred, a thousand, a million times – or, conversely, slow down by any of those factors – and it would make no detectable difference whatever to the universe. Our experience, and the way of being of everything around us, would be absolutely unchanged.
[* Yes, we’re talking about the speed of light here.]
This is because what we refer to as ‘timing’ a process or event is actually a comparison of two distances travelled by energy flows: around the process/event and around the ‘timing’ device, whatever that may be. That comparison doesn’t change, whatever the speed of those energy flows.
In short: any externally imposed ‘rate of time’ would be 100% irrelevant to the workings of the material universe. So inclusion of that concept in our world view is a red herring, it simply gets in the way of an objective analysis of material reality. Time, in that sense, does not exist.
[This reasoning, of course, applies equally to the ‘proper time’ of objects in different frames of reference, for those concerned with relativity theory.]
How the – ? What the – ? Who the – ?
But … but … but there is time. We experience it every day, every minute, every second.
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Transience Clouds, bluebells, Each reinforcing our perception of the steady progress of time – whether it be minutes, days, or thousands of years. |
Yes. We experience sequencing of events – but we also experience sequencing of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and the sequencing of notes on the piano. Neither of them involves time. We also have the sensation of duration: we can even check that sensation against a clock – but that’s just comparing the distance travelled by energy flows around the circuits in our brain with distance around energy-flow circuits in our clock. Two distances again.
So – dammit, what is the thing we experience as time?
It’s the mind rationalising a rather greater (though actually very simple) cosmic principle – just as the mind rationalises some electromagnetic frequencies as colours. That’ll have to wait for another time – but you could try reading this paper in the meantime (especially the final paragraph). [You'll need to register, free, here first.]
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Hi Grahame, very interesting and thought-provoking. Thanks for this post, Peter
Even though time seems to be a man-made concept, it’s perception is created by change caused by motion. For example, a certain position of the sun in the sky determines the time of the day. Motion plays an important part in it because change occurs when an object moves from one location to another.
Theoretically, if it was possible to exist without worrying about time, for instance, if you were allowed to come to work at your conveniece instead of 8 o’clock in the morning, and leave whenever you feel like it, and if it wouldn’t have any impact on anyone, then the perception and track of time could be entirely lost. Change would be occurring without any time restictions or any point of reference on a time scale. An object wouldn’t need a, what is accepted to be a 7 year restriction, to be considered 7-year old. What the clock really measures is change in space.
Perhaps, the loss of the perception of time, in its turn, might actually stop time….as well as unwanted change such as aging created by it, and may be we’ll never age or die because we won’t have an estimated expiration date.
It’s also confusing to qualify time as the fourth dimension because the 3 visually perceivable dimensions are spacial. One would expect the 4th dimension to be spacial as well.
What is also interesting is that a time restriction, like 1 hour, is experienced differently in different circumstances by different people. You always hear some say, “The week went by so quickly. It felt like 3 days.” Or vise versa, “This week has been dragging on forever.”
It’s amazing, that they use an adjective that measures distance
when they talk about time as in “it’s been a really LONG time since anybody questioned anything”.
I view “Time” as being intertwined in many phenomena such as change caused by motion, speed of the motion, frequency of the occurrence of change, direction of the motion, distance, planetary rotation, change in solar illunimation of the earth, and change of seasons and time of the day.
How can somebody determine whether an object is moving fast or slow? Or how can you prevent the occurence of the oncoming evening, when it’s afternoon, and you know that evening is inevitable no matter what you do? You know that it will come at 6pm, for instance, and you wait for it, and, surely, it does come.
Whether time is inherently existing, or it’s just a concept that people invented in order to better understand their reality, the perception of time is created in your brain due to the above mentioned phenomena.
When people talk about time as being the fourth dimension, they talk about a different kind of time. Even though past and future is a time frame in someone’s life, it’s not the same kind of time that the clock measures in order to determine speed, for example. Therefore, it’s hard for some people to comprehend the idea that past and present can exist simultaneously with present in a different, but parallel dimension(s).
You are basically saying time doesn’t exist because it’s energy traveling from one point to another, but for energy to travel, it needs time to do it in, else it is at the starting and finishing point at the same time (aswell as everywhere in between), because traveling is the act of moving from one point to another. so it according to your theory it isnt traveling at all.. I think what you’ve done is give a theory on how time works, rather than disprove it..
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, I don’t have a degree, and I’m definitively not as good as you with words, but I felt the need to share this.
Thanks for your comment, Ben. You’re right that I’m relating time to the transition of energy from one place or state to another, but my main point is more fundamental than that. We measure time by changes on a clock face, state-changes in an atom, level that a candle has burned down to, or even the perception of duration registered by changes in our brain. And all of these are basically DISTANCES – the distance that energy has travelled to produce those effects. We attribute this to something we refer to as ‘time’ – but there’s no objective reality, outside of our perception, that supports that concept. Alter the ’speed’ of light (a time-based concept) and absolutely nothing changes in our real-world experience – since ALL of that experience is governed by that speed, acting like a metronome keeping everything in perfect synch. Nothing – apart from our perception – indicates that ‘time-states’ of the universe are separated by ‘time-intervals’ as opposed to all coexisting ’simultaneously’ (another time-based word – that concept is ingrained into our collective psyche).
In short: There IS something going on – but to attribute it to a concept of ‘duration’ in the sense that we understand that concept is to assume that what we perceive is the objective reality. Quantum Mechanics has shown us in many ways that this isn’t necessarily the case.
You can also say space doesn’t exist either. For example: How far is a foot ? Well it’s 12 inches. So then how far is an inch ? This is defined by so many wavelengths of a frequency of light. But how far is a wave length of this light ?
You can go on and on and finally you see that all lengths are defined in terms of other lengths. Or length is relative. Time is also defined relative to other times.
I’ve having a lot of trouble making sense of any of the arguments. I think a lot more study has to go into this before we can say “time doesn’t exist”
The numbers 1,2,3,4,5 written here are not a sequence in space unless you have time also. You need time to observe the numbers. Things in space have to be observed and observations take time.
Thanks, Jeff, for your comment. The point that you’re making is very important – all distance is, of course, relative. We have no way of knowing how big the universe is in absolute terms, so of course the idea of ‘absolute size’ of the universe has no meaning.
That’s a little bit different, though, from the point I’m making about time. First it’s necessary to see that the concept of ’sequence’ does have meaning without reference to time. For instance, I can take an instantaneous snapshot of houses in a street, all in the same shot, with house numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 (the even numbers are on the other side of the street here in the UK). That’s a sequence, and it’s represented in two spatial dimensions on a snapshot. Sure, it takes time to assimilate the info in that snapshot – but that’s a feature of sensory perception, not of the sequence itself.
If one goes deeper into it then it does turn out that something more is needed just for things to exist at all, something that we refer to as ‘time’. But the point that I’m making is that the thing we refer to as ‘time’ – when we measure time in any way – can always be reduced to a comparison of two distances. There’s no need for anything other than spatial dimensions to fully explain our measurement of time. This suggests that what we refer to as ‘time’ is actually something rather different, interpreted that way by our sensory system as a ‘notational convenience’ (i.e. makes life easier for us). There’s actually no need for anything more than spatial dimensions (including one that our consciousness interprets to us as ‘time’) for a full explanation of observed phenomena. [Note that this is NOT the same interpretation of 'time' as the proposed 4th dimension of 'spacetime' in the sense that relativity theory uses it.]
If ‘Time’ didn’t exist, then there would be no ‘Speed of Light’ and all physical laws would break down. Just as our thoughts are physical, time is too.
Thanks for your comment, Chris. I think your point is answered by my post, where I show that the speed of light (and all other speeds) is effectively a comparison of two distances. Now thought, that’s another matter entirely …
like the concept of god. they’re human concepts.
Perhaps if time were something else it could be called that.
Times can be illusory.
Its rather simpel acually. The concept of time is for the most part based on our perception. We use the more or less even intervals of detectable phenomena as a measurement for other phenomena, even our own perception.. In the pure materialistic (natural) sense, there is no need for something like time, only enery that interacts with other energy that is moving relative to each other in space.
This is one of the best explanations I have read in a very long time. There are few other issues of time non-existence that would need to be added to fully explain the truth but not many would understand it. What you need to realize is that to grasp the truth a highly logical mind is required, only a handful of people are actually capable of abstract thinking on that level. For a ‘normal’ person once the conclusion exceeds the brain’s capability of logic it goes into an overdrive mode producing highly illogical absurdities (the best example of this here is the comment by Jeff Guarino). I have been observing this for years and gave up recently as I realized that there was a very good reason for the likes of Einstein to live a life of solitudy and frustration. As Einstein once said – “Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.”
Hi, I agree with you completely, however please note that we experience a present- that is that we exist in in “time”. This “location present” makes little sense in a world which has allways existed, why would the present for me writing this post be any more real at this very moment than any other ones? Why would there be a distinction which I sense in this very moment?
More importantly which I want you to answer is, if the flow of time is a contruct of the human brain- how come it progresses in a completley consistent way- birth -death with no inconsistencys?.
How come time doesn’t mess up when we hit our head seriously? why does not time change when we fall asleep(seriously alter the brain state)? Again it’s all giving the impression that time exists independent of our brains perception.
It truly does feel like we perceive the time flow rather than independently organise it. I am not in favour of intuitive arguments generally but the consistency is so high that one has to wonder.
Ultimately I agree with you but I am keen on getting a grip on this.
Hi, the brain doesn t progress in a consistent way. If you were a cockroach, the world would be moving faster, way faster. People with some mental disorders see the world movind faster, when you are in a dangerous sitiation, and you see everything slowing down. Thats your brain processing things as fast as it can be, and “slowing” time. So its not a consistent way that the brain processes the world. You were talking about, birth, death. Its not consistent, people in africa, in some contrys live at average 45 years, and in europe an everage os 70 years. Its a matter os tenchnology, os money, of health. What if every thing stoped… Every person, every car, every animal, every bacteria, the winds, the seas, the clouds, the nuclear reactions inside the sun. And nothing hapened anywhere, would there be time still? Its not a question of time. Time is as real as our imagination. Sorry for the bad english. Not my first language.
Hello,
I am a teenager trying desperately to understand this post. I feel that I have some grip on it, but I have a problem with the fact that we perceive time even when there is not motion. For example, say I were to lock myself in a rather silent, windowless room. I am strapped to a chair and cannot move, and I close my eyes. For all intents and purposes, sensory motion has stopped for me (excepting inner-body perceptions of ‘motion’ or ‘time’ such as my heartbeat or breathing). Yet I still feel that time exists.
So, as Roberto above me asks, if all motion were to stop, how could we reconcile the nonexistence of time with the fact that we would still feel very much a part of time in the present, would have a memory of the past (when there was motion), and could mentally project ourselves into the future? If everything stopped, we would still have memory, basically, which implies a past to be remembered. If motion ceased and time even appeared to human sensory perception to cease, how could we reconcile the existence of our memories? Would memory cease to exist only because our perception of present and future time ceased? I feel that we would still carry with us a sense of the “past” though “present” and “future” may no longer have any meaning.
I hope I wrote that clearly enough. It’s an odd thing to talk about time. And ironically, enough “time” has passed in my writing that I am now late for dinner. I think…
Hi Will,
A very fair comment and a sensible observation. The ’simple’ answer (it’s not a simple topic!) is that there is NEVER a situation where there is not motion – if there were then the universe would instantly cease to exist.
Einstein told us that matter is a form of energy (E=mc-squared), and energy can never be static. Even the energy in a dry-cell battery, for example, is maintained by the circulating motion of the electrons in its component atoms. It’s actually the motion of the fundamental energy-flows forming elementary particles that gives us the illusion of solidity of those particles, if that motion were to stop (which thankfully it can’t) then those particles which form our physical reality would collapse into nothing.
The point that I’m making in this post is that something has to carry the effects of time, from our past through our now into our future – something has to give rise to the effects that we refer to in general terms as ‘aging’ – whether it’s an explosion happening, a plant absorbing sunlight, a seed sprouting, a chemical reaction, radioactive decay, you-name-it. That something is the continuous process of energy-flow that gives form to our physical environment – the physical universe in all its detail. Energy flowing around in particles to give them form and between particles as electromagnetic radiation accounts fully for every time-based effect that we can think of.
The natural dispersal of free energy – like those grasshoppers in my post – is the process referred to in science as ‘(increasing) entropy’, which is also often referred to as ‘the arrow of time’ (since it accounts for time effects). Energy that isn’t free, but is bound up in particles, MUST also be responsible for changes in those particles such as radioactive decay or absorption or release of photons (which is the energy change behind chemical reactions) – that’s all there is.
So it follows that the amount of ‘time that has passed’ corresponds exactly with the distance that has been travelled by any one of those energy flows, whether in a particle or between particles. In the case of your feeling the passage of time, as well as the obvious effect of your blood-flow and heartbeat there are the myriad electrical flows constantly passing through your nervous system (which includes your senses) and your brain, triggering synapses and effecting changes – all of which you will attribute to ‘the passage of time’.
Thanks again, Will, for your question & observation. As I say, it’s not an easy issue to get your head round. And unquestionably, what we sense as ‘time’ must surely represent some deeper cosmic truth . But in itself, everything we call ‘an effect of time’ can be explained by the passage of energy from A to B – and the rate of that passage of energy is totally irrelevant to the effects that we experience, as I’ve tried to show in this post. I.e. ‘objective time’ is a meaningless concept as far as our physical experience is concerned – and our physical experience is the only thing we have to measure by.
I hope your dinner wasn’t cold, and that you didn’t get told off …
Hey everyone..
From my point view, we haven’t evolved enough to make definite claims about abstract things as time and space are. We cannot understand them, this is beyond our mind’s reach. Every time you think about it, you get mind-blown and come to a conclusion that makes perfect sense in one way, but beats itself out in an another way. Just like there is no biggest number of all.
I know that it is maybe fun to think about these ideas but you can’t define something that is beyond the grasp of our own conscience.
Suppose WE were not there , will TIME be there? If yes then, it has nothing to do with OUR perception.
What about superposition? if a particle can exist anywhere at any given “time” and still be linked ( supersymmetry ) then the observer creating the result would also be creating the concept of time ( and space for they are two sides of a coin )?
So time is just a way of us rationalising the fact that anything could happen but we subconsciously feel it necessary to dictate the result.
Superposition and symmetry lead me to believe that every particle that was once close together at the point of the “big bang” are all still linked and can communicate instantly.. yes faster than the speed of light because without our observing there is no such thing as speed.
I’m not saying i know anything at all but this seems to make some sense to me.. we can only percieve our known dimensions so untill we let go of reality and realise that energy is complately random.. but patterns can still be found in randomness, we will be stuck where we are.
Jure, no one can make definite claim about abstract theories. All physics is theoretical. But giving up on thinking about something just because you don’t understand it isn’t going to get us anywhere. If we just sit back and wait for evolution to teach us lessons we wont learn anything because we arent giving ourself something to evolve into.
I have read a great deal on this subject, and I realize how simple minded this question is going to sound. However- My only inquiry I have left after researching the theory of time being nonexistent is- Why do we age? Why do our bodies get older? How does that tie into energy flows, or motion? Things grow. We all change. Change happens over TIME. I am a huge conspiracy-theorist. I am extremely into reading about nearly anything to be pondered on about this world. But this is an idea I can’t seem to believe. Which O can admit, at times I am gullible. I’d rather say open minded to any and all possibilities though. (; And this theory or whatever you’d like to say this is; doesn’t seem valid. Time exists. That is my opinion. Einstein was a wise man, and I’m positive of that. Why didn’t HE ever say in certainty that time doesn’t exist? Or did he?
These are just a quick post of my thoughts. Any responses would be awesome! I don’t know many people I can discuss these things with, so websites like this are my OUT. Thanks!
Time exists only in our minds. The earth exists moving the flowers grow regardless of our minds the sun irradsiates its energy but every action is happening only in the present the earth is not thinking of the flowers of tomorrow or about the yesterday’s volcano eruptions we understand nothing of actual reality, barely our minds cope with our six senses (yes, including the sixth sense of balance) and rationalize about phenomena as time, other than in our minds there is not such thing as time.
Hi Ashok,
The whole point of the post is that all of the effects of time that we perceive are just that – perception. It follows that time is a subjective effect, there is no evidence that it in any way exists as an objective phenomenon, and so no reason for us to believe that it does.
Hi Sammy,
Thanks for your two comments. I totally agree that we shouldn’t give up on thinking about things – that’s exactly what this post is all about. We won’t move forward unless we examine our preconceptions, including those about time, to see whether they stand up to analysis or whether they are actually just over-simplistic assumptions. Seems to me that we’ve made assumptions about time that have no real basis in fact (when you look at the evidence) and then not bothered to look at those assumptions any further – it’s high time (!!) that we did!
Hi Jules,
Nothing at all simple-minded about your question. We see the successive stages in the state of our bodies (also flowers, rocks, etc etc) – what we call ‘ageing’ – as proof of the objective existence of time. But what if all those stages actually exist together in some all-embracing ‘now’ (aka ‘eternity’ – which isn’t the same as time going on forever, it’s timelessness)? What if our perception of ageing is just our consciousness moving through those successive stages, just like walking down a street? We don’t say one house is older than another just because it’s further down the road – the difference is in our perception, not the houses.
As for Einstein, just because he didn’t happen to say something doesn’t mean it ain’t so. Einstein is one of my heroes – but just because he didn’t (as far as I know) ever say that mangoes taste great doesn’t alter my view that they do. He talked about a lot of things, but he never (for example) said that the moon isn’t made of cheese – does that mean we should believe it is?
Hi, I am no scientist but is time not like sound, there has to be a some kind of receiver or like colour, if everyone could only see in Black and White, would colour exist?
I personally think all of what we now witness as time happened in the singularity of the Big bang and we now live in its echo. So everything that has happened and will ever happen occurred at the very same time but our locked minds need consistency therefore we have a uniform time?
But look at Quantum Physics…. it does what it wants because it’s not bound by our laws of the mind? and maybe that’s why children tend to see so called ghosts or events that are happening at the same time but they’re to young to perceive time ( not controlled by day to day life )
Anyway like I said I’m no scientist just saying what I think, It might be a load of tosh!!!! but who actually know???