A look at time

What is Time?

The greatest trick the universe ever pulled was convincing us that time exists. (title line of New Scientist 19th Jan 2008's cover story).

This article states that even physicists don't really know what time is and that some are not sure it exists. In the quest for new theories of the universe, physicists are starting to suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature.

Time is the clock ticking

Second by second

Minute by minute

Hour by hour

Year by year

Time is of human creation.

Time is a unit of measurement we use to document our journey through life.

525,600 minutes = 1 year.

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity time and space are connected and form four-dimensional space-time. In general relativity time is not absolute and different observers have different times, like when its 12:00 in England its 24:00 at the other side of the world. Time does not flow when the universe is viewed as a whole.

Time plays a key part Quantum mechanics. It is used to keep track of the ever-changing probabilities of the quantum universe.

General Relativity treats space and time as one and Quantum Mechanics splits the universe in two. The first part is the quantum system that is being observed. The second part is the classical world outside.

In my view time is just a figment of our imagination, it does not really exist.

We live in a timeless universe where nothing ever disappears and nothing ever appears, everything always is, all of the time.This is what could be described as a preordained universe that is waiting to reveal its secrets.

It is hard for most of us to accurately judge the passage of "time" without the presence of a clock ticking the seconds minutes and hours away.

Time as we know it day by day is imperfect. Not so long ago a leap second was added to the worlds atomic clocks to keep them in line with the universe. We need a leap day evey four years to keep our calenders in line with the universe.

Is time travel posible?

The English mathematician, Stephen Hawking once proposed a very interesting question on Time Travel. He asked: "If you could have Time Travel, wouldn't they already be here telling us about it?"

With this one sentence he seemed to have solved the very question of Time Travel. It cannot be possible because we don't know about it or can it?

This is a good argument.

It is known that time travel is not possible in the current Physics environment and that our understanding would have to change to make it a possibility.

By rewriting special relativity to create a timeless universe you could say that time travel is possible.

We humans travel through what we perceive as time from our birth to our death. We go back in time when we recall our past and to the future when we imagine and anticipate what to come in our life. We capture past events on film (video and still images) and in writing. We take ourselves back in time when we read the books and watch TV shows on our history. Astronomers looking at the stars are actually looking into the universes past. The further away from the earth the look the further back in time the look.

If time travel was possible would the Quantum Leap scenario be possible? What would happen if you could go back in time and change history? If you could change the past what would happen to the future (your present)? If you could go back in time to meet your hero who would it be?

In Quantum Leap Sam Beckett travels back in time to change history.
The opening lines of season 3-5 are:
Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished .... He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

If you could go back in time and change the past it would effect the future (your present).You could create a time paradox. If you went back in time and killed one of your grandfather's before your mom or dad was born then you would not exist so could not have gone back in time to do it so it would never have happened. If you add in the parallel universe theory you can say that instead of changing the future you create a new one in a parallel universe.