“Time. We kill time, spend time, lose time, make time, beat time, take time, waste time; but we virtually never consider time, much less understand it.” –Richard Berendzen, physicist, astronomer and my university professor
The Atlantic contains a must read article, The debate over time’s place in the universe, on physicists grappling with time.
Questions like these informed my faith and worldview as I minored in physics in college.
The way I conceptualize time is this way:
There you are standing there, still.
But oh! Not still! You may be unmoving in the first three dimensions, length, width, and height. But you are zooming through the fourth dimension, which is time.
We are never still in Einstein’s spacetime. Of course, the faster you approach the speed of light in the first three, the slower it goes for you in the fourth — hello relativity!
Nobody sits still. We are hurtling through spacetime.
Per The Atlantic article, I suppose my conception is most like the “accretive” theory described at the end.
Perhaps when we die, we cease to flow through the first three dimensions so easily, but how could you ever cease to flow through the fourth? If time is made of particles, maybe we exist forever in the particles that we existed in, even as new time is added. Maybe heaven is merely another word for time.
Happy Saturday!
If you like to ponder time — and really, what better could you do with your time? — consider the following posts:
Why the passage of time confounds us
Down with gravity, up with entropy!
Don’t let unconscious inertia decide for you
Outsourcing versus insourcing your own life
Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it
We love consistency but need change, voila, the seasons
Riveting reflection on time! Thanks so much Andrea.
We experience time; a rock doesn’t. We observe changes in it, but that is because we are observing it. Time exists as a real thing for us because of the simple fact we are energy machines, totally enthralled by the second law of thermodynamics. Further, we energy machines can communicate directly only because we invent time in order to arrange meetings. A classroom can be called “Alpine Hall 302” in three dimensions, but a class room of students and professor requires a time coordinate.
I’ve learned a lot from Ilya Prigogine about time, but obviously not enough.
Strictly speaking, we’re not fixed in space either — that implies an Absolute Reference Frame, which is a big no-no in modern Relativity.
I suspect ‘time’ is the result of quantum information processing, i.e. it represents the number of ‘clicks’ between signaling events (A radio emits, another radio receives the message some finite number of quantum clicks later). Maybe black holes are analogous to a PC Blue Screen of Death — the ‘universal computer’ is overloaded in one region and simply stops processing as it untangles.
And then Shannon/Boltzmann entropy plays a role somehow, because -of course- entropy will matter somehow.
Fun ideas, thanks for sharing!
So fun, thanks for this. Entropy always matters. 🙂