Could you say that past and future exist?
Is time a subjective illusion based on passing phenomena?
Is it an essential element of space, the fourth dimension without which nothing can exist or happen?
Is it just a convention of speech, like speaking of the equator or longitude as a convenience of positioning and measurement?
Lacking a category for philosophy, I put this in travel for those who love Dr Who.
It is a natural force which keeps every thing from happening at once.
It is whatever you make it...
LOL ! :D
A broad approach.
Perhaps an unconscious reality for us all. :)
Answer thief.
'Time' is the word which linearly dependent beings assign to the concept of a perceivable 'interval' between places or events. It normally exists in the context of planetary rotation/revolution or the movement of other heavenly bodies.
Your answer contradicts itself.
Yes, I know what you mean. At some phases of life when not much is changing from day to day, time flows like a river, and one bit of water seems indistinguishable from another.
Better question...What time is it?
On the the first statement, yes, that's my intuitive feeling about it too.
But according to scientists, time began with the Big Bang and cannot exist independently of space: it requires the existence of matter in order to be a phenomenon of change. The Big Bang event is not a theory anymore due to the amount of evidence. But the future is still theoretical. In one model, the universe will eventually reach a limit to it's possible expansion, and begin to contract until it implodes and disappears in a reverse of the bang at which point, time, space, and matter all cease to exist. In another model the universe may continue to expand endlessly, and so existence and time continue, but with entropy and dissipation of form and matter as we now know it.
Your second statement I don't understand and would love to hear more about it from you.
Last statement - lol ! - much enjoyed.
I'm sure we made use of elapsing times long before unions, but your point is an excellent one because it shows how they helped make time such a huge and pressured but necessary factor in all our working lives.
:)
Does anybody really care?
That "'compressed' in a black hole into a state of superposition," makes a lot of sense. I'll read up on it a bit more. Thank you.
I also like "moves or elapses but change gives the impression of the passage of time. (In a relative way)."
I'll check that out too.
I've heard that physicists have 22 theories of time, but haven't yet looked them up. Looks like it's time for me to do so. :)
So, we avoid the sticky questions and take the practical approach. Thank you.
About the title question, scientists and philosophers write whole books about it, and students read them, so yes, a few people do care.
About Element99's question, most Westerner's live their whole lives by what time it is. Most of us care enough to always have a means of telling the time close to hand.
