What is time ? (Part 1) | Universe and Us (Segment 4)

Hope you would have liked our posts from this series “Universe and Us”.

So far in our former posts we tried to enlighten you about some of notions of space like about its formation and what does word space actually means. Notwithstanding the fact that this topic is little nerdy to read but it’s good to be familiarized with totality (Universe) of our lives.

Before the blink of your eye let’s get expertise about forthcoming concept TIME. Not to mention this is our fourth post from the series “Universe and Us”. If these kinds of topics interest you Do check our other posts too.

Let’s take our time and carefully explore this timeless topic.

What is time?

If you were an alien visitor to Earth trying to learn our language by eavesdropping on conversations, you might have a hard time answering this question.

Humans spend a lot of time talking about time but almost no time talking about what time actually is!

We check the time all the time.

We talk about having bad times, good times, old times, and crazy times.

We save time, keep time, make time, spend time, cut time, and pass time. Time can be up, out, over, and even down.

It waits for no man or woman!

Sometimes it flies and sometimes it creeps up on you and sometimes it ticks away.

Most of the time, we simply run out of time.

But what is it? Is it a physical thing (like matter or space) or an abstract concept we layer on top of our experience of the universe?

If you were hoping physicists had an answer to the deep and somewhat confusing question of time, you would be wrong. Time is still one of the great mysteries in physics, one that calls into question the very definition of what physics is.

So what is time? If you stopped random strangers on the street today and asked them to define time, you might get answers like:

“Time is the difference between then and now.”

“Time is what tells us when things happen.”

“Time is what clocks measure.”

“Time is money so leave me alone!”

These are plausible definitions of time, but them all raise questions. For example, you can ask, “Why is there a ‘then’ and a ‘now’ in the first place?” or “What does ‘when’ even mean?” or “Aren’t clocks subject to time also?”

We think this much of information is enough in single post but this topic is so wide and we want to tell you more so we will continue this in other post.

Thanking “Jorge Cham” and “Daniel Whiteson”, for their book “We have no Idea”, we conclude our post here.