Last time we tried to understand “Time”, but the irony is due to shortage of time we were not able to complete our discussion.
So here we are with the last post from the series “Universe and us”.
As time well spent lead to money so let’s not waste any and go through Time (Part-2).
We were trying to have a definition for time but part of the difficulty in defining time is that it is so ingrained in our way of thinking. Time is how we relate the “now” we have now with the “now” we had before.
Whatever we are feeling now is what we call the present, but the present is fleeting and ephemeral: there’s no way to savor it or stretch it.
But time is also about the future. Being able to connect the future to the past and the present is very important.
It’s hard to imagine the human experience without the concept of time.
The same is true for the way that physics thinks about time. In fact, time is embedded in the very definition of physics! Physics, is nothing more than “the study of matter and its motion through space and time.” Even the word “motion” assumes the concept of time.
The basic job of physics is to use the past to understand what futures are possible and how we could affect them. Physics makes no sense without time.
The truth is that any definition of time by humans is likely to be distorted by the nature of our experience.
Think about it: just thinking about time requires time!
It might be that alien physicists don’t have the same concept of time that we do because their experience and patterns of thought are different in some deeply alien way that our current subjective experience prevents us from truly grasping.
Now the biggest question of all time. Can we travel in time ?
In some science fiction stories, aliens or advanced humans are able to view time as a spatial dimension and move back and forth over it; this allows them to move through time the way you and I walk up and down the hallway.
And while these are very fun stories to read and enjoy, they have serious problems from a physics perspective.
First, moving backward in time can break causality. If you want the universe to make sense, than you need to know about causality which generally speaking means “no event can occur without a prior cause”.
Like for example your credit card cannot be billed before you buy something, or someone cannot eat your breakfast before you prepare it, you cannot read this post before we’ve prepared it etc.
Moving on since we can’t move backward in time, you might reasonably ask, “Why does time move forward?”
The concept of time not moving forward is bizarre to us. You wouldn’t expect that an oven would turn cooked food raw or that ice cubes might form in your drink on a hot day.
In the same way, you can remember things that happen in the past, but you can’t remember things that happen in the future.
Time appears to have a preferred direction, and we have no idea why.
Some physicists have given their lifetime to uncover time but not able to understand it completely and we are trying to describe all of it in this tiny post which come to think of is full of absurdity.
These questions about the nature of time are very deep, and the answers have the potential to shake the very foundations of modern physics.
Although interesting these questions are difficult to tackle. We can’t stop time to study it, and we can’t make repeated time measurements of the same event.
Perhaps we will make progress by tackling these problems head-on, or perhaps we will stumble upon a crucial insight when working on a different problem.
Only time will tell.
As we were telling before “Jorge Cham” and “Daniel Whiteson” and their book “We have no Idea” is the reason that we tried to tell you about these topics. If you want more you can go through their book it will definitely put you mind to some workout.
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