Is Time real?

Sometimes I read articles about Einstein and his theories that many have proven to be true giving us Atomic power and more understanding of the Universe.I get confused with some of his ideas with Time and Distance.If I get drunk at a party sometimes my mind will often get obsessed with trying to understand some of these theories and of course I will bore everyone to death until I get kicked out of the party.My question is does time really exist?Our body only dies because of radiation constantly bombarding our DNA until our cells can not reproduce anymore.Also The DNA is programmed to reproduce so many cycles which is really like distance not time.Like saying our cells can only walk so far before they die out.The Earth moves around the sun giving the illusion of day and night and seasons but this is all distance...not time.What the heck is carbon dating?Can this prove that time exists?can someone explain carbon dating how it works?I know old fossils can be carbon dated to tell how old they are but I believe everything just rots not from time but how far bacteria moves eating at it or the wind eroding it...just conditions of distance not time.Does anyone understand what I mean?Also why do scientists say that Time would be altered for someone to travel in a Black hole.That would be impossible if Time does not really exist so I get very confused with all the theories,can someone help?

LOL!! dude when i get drunk, i tend to talk to girls until I approach the wrong one and THEN get kicked out of the party..

Ya I gotta admit that's happened to me too

Read up on Quantum mechanics. There are only theories to "what" time is, though. I believe it exists, but perception can alter it for you. Like if you're drunk or high, and time seems to goes faster or slower.

As for time travel, we are always moving forward. I used to believe that traveling back in time was impossible. I now believe that if someone were to travel backwards to 1969, they would create an alternate universe to their's. This alternate would be identical to the 1969 in their original universe. Changing the future would only affect this "new" universe, and not the original. That would be why no time travelers have ever been confirmed, and possibly could explain some people's disappearances.
I don't think you can ever return to the original universe, though you could possibly "rearrange" events in order to bring forth a more similar universe to the original.

Sorry, I'm gonna stop right now. I could go on and on like this, throwing out theory after theory. Just read up on quantum mechanics.

Is time real?
As long as you are....
LOL

and dude your as smooth a party conversation person as I am....except I don't get drunk so I have no excuse.

first off, if you want to start to understand what time is, you gotta stop or slow down on the alcohol. becuase it impairs your senses man.
use some salvia... that will allow you to leave your physical body and not be effected by time and space.

if you use your senses more daily when you are consciously aware, it will help you in the other realm where you are usually not conscious of your surroundings becuase you're eyes arent open. i hope that makes sense.


Time is not everything..... but it definitely everything that we can see with our eyes. time made everything that is physical. anything 'created' was made using 'time'. physical creation cannot escape time.

but see... here's the thing. we are not just 'created'. There is a part of us all that was never created. it always has been, always is, and always will be.

That part... is what we call .. "I"

thats why time is so crazy and confusing. becuase can experience time. we do every second that goes by. as long as we all exist in this human form... we will experience this crazy thing we call time.

My personal opinion is that time is an artificial construct of the mind. It is a perception which is relative and individual to a person.

Measured time and space (distance) are connected in a wierd way because the faster you go, the slower time runs for you. If you can travel at the speed of light, it goes quite slowly but unfortunately your body mass would become heavier and heavier the faster you go.

Yes, we have physical correlates of ageing due to tissue damage and chromosomal shortening at the ends of the chromosomes (called telomeres). The older you get, the shorter your telomeres get. This can increase damage to DNA.

However, paraphrasing Augustine, our past is gone, our future is not made. What are we living in? Is it a permanent present? If we split our time into seconds, the last second has gone, the next second is the future and we are in the present second. But what if you split the time into milliseconds? Wierd huh!

As far as carbon dating goes, I think it is like this: radioactive carbon (Carbon-14) is made constantly by cosmic rays hitting nitrogen in the atmosphere. So we have a 'high' amount of Carbon-14 right.

However, in older organisms which have lived, the Carbon-14 was 'locked away' in their body parts. for example skin, body tissues etc.. But, it decayed and decayed at regular times (5730 years to decay to half the radioactivity each time). So in older things, there is a little radioactivity left showing its age.

In newer things there is more radioactivity because it gets taken in from the atmosphere by plants which are then eaten by animals etc..

Since Time is an impalpable quantity it is not posible to draw a picture or construct a model of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it can be imagined and it can be represnted mathematically. And in order to describe the stupendous reaches of the universe beyond our solar sytem. byond the lonely outer galaxies burning in the void, the sceintist must visualize it all as a continuum in three dimensions of space and one of time. But the separation is purely subjective; and as the Specail Theroy of Relativity showed, space and time separately are relative quantities which vary with individual observers. In any objective description of the universe, such as science demands, the time dimension can no more be detached from the breadth and thickness in an accurate representation of a house, a tree, or Ozzy Osbourn. According to the great German mathematician, Herman Minkowski, who developed the mathematics of the space-time continuum as a convenient medium for expressing the principles of Relativity, " Space and time separately have vanished into the merest shadows, and only a sort of combination of the two perserves any reality."
It must not be thought, however that the space-time continuum is simply mathematical construction. The world is a space-time continuum; all reality exists both in space and time, and the two are indivisible. All measurements in space, and conversely mesurements in space depend on the mesurements of time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, are measurements of the earth's position in space relative to the sun, moon, and stars.

So you ask, is time real? Yes time is a real mesurement of our time-space reality...
Yeah IM that guy at the party who is deep and always has some kinda of deeper to life answer.. Questions.. I love that stuff man! You would love to hang out with us!!! No one kicks you out for being smart..hehe

Time can also be seen as a description of entropy. Entropy, or the continual build of disorder in our universe, is a handy way to put the idea of distance between two events. Those two events are like two points on a piece of paper. But the time we experience is not linear. While a straight line will get you between the points fast you could also wiggle around and make a few lines here and there and then come to the second point. It's about the path that we take to get between two points.

The reason we see time as such a straight arrow path is because a point is not a real thing or idea. The path exists but how do you break down the distance? You can chop the line up any way you want but the idea of a point is a concept on the line. It's like attempting to define 'now'. The idea of going from one point to another is also a closed system. Only once you've passed the point that is further in time can you define it as a point or destination. You experience time and life continually and defining time in this point linear fashion is a means of describing previous experience in a standardized way.

Time exists in the way that numbers exist. We can find them in the world, in patterns, and we use them everyday. But they don't 'exist'.

Time is a good concept.................it keeps EVERYTHING from happening all at once.

I don't believe in time, per se. I believe in seasons and I don't believe we have to 'grow old' just because we reach a certain age. I am 44 this October, and I have not aged like my peers. The reason being is that I don't live my life by the clock. I use the clock to regulate when I have to take my tablets, or when there is an appointment with my GP(doctor). I live my life moment by moment, and cherish each moment of every day, regardless if I have trials or tribulations, as they are part of my learning experience in this earthly body.

I don't get stressed out over money, debts, or anything of that nature. I am disabled with spastic paraplegia and on benefit (I did work before my illness struck me down). I do get upset when my trust is put in question, or if I am lied to, and I just see them as moments for me to reflect upon.

I have a clear memory of aspects of my childhood and other key events in my life. I see them in my mind's eye as if I was back reliving them. I don't worry about time, as it essentially doesn't exist.

Moments exist in our lives that we can reflect upon, and learn from, but to worry about time and age that is a misnomer.

If time exists then we are only on Earth in body for a blink of a second compared to the age of Earth and it's place in the universe.

My husband worries more about time than I do. He has to wear a watch. I only ask him for the time when it is related to my medication, which I have to make sure is spaced at least 4-6 hours between doses. In that case, I use time as a marker, time doesn't use me.

Einsteins theories have always been perplexing, but I feel that he touched upon points that are valid.

I have pondered over the same question as you (sober) and the answer is 'real time' does not exist.

Think about it; you time travel when you go back and forth on an aeroplane to different parts of the world. So when you go to the states are you depending on where you are going. For example,' You leave the UK and travel to the US to a state that is 7 hours behind from when you left. Are you 7 hours younger, or seven hours older' I think Jet Lag is the result of the body adjusting physiologically to the time differential in the air. Then that begs the question. When the astronauts are on the space station, which time do they use. They stop aging, or they slow down.

Einstein said that time can be folded and manipulated; so time as we think of it isn't a fixed point in the space -time continuum. Time can be manipulated and controlled, as it isn't a fixed anomalie.

Time is real, and the exploration of it is something that has fascinated humankind ever since... well, ever since we became aware of cyclical changes on the Earth and the aging of things.

Now... there are a number of different methods of exploring it in science, philosophy, and art, and the people who have contributed to this over the ages include some of the finest thinkers of their time.

Wikipedia (while not being entirely accurate) has a nice overview of it here:
en.wikipedia.org...

Time in physics is discussed here:
en.wikipedia.org...

Time in philosophy is here:
en.wikipedia.org...

Time (as studied in psychology) is briefly mentioned here:
en.wikipedia.org...

They touch on time as it relates to culture here (I have several good books on this). Whorf isn't quite as good on the subject as Hall :
en.wikipedia.org...

I hope you'll take a little time for yourself to explore some of these, even if only glancing at a few Wikipedia articles to see what great minds through the ages have had to say on this fascinating topic.

...and just to distract you (evil of me, isn't it?) here's an interesting page on some of the time travel paradoxes, discussed by folks from Rutgers.
plato.stanford.edu...

Okay... my personal rave on the topic.

It Time is just another dimension, along with X/Y/Z and the other obscure minor ones that physicists think exist, then the Universe is in reality static.

At position X/Y/Z/T in the Universe the either exists a particle or the isn't.
That fact is a simple static truth.

With that in mind, going backwards in time would be sort of pointless. You would merely perform your life backwards. Growing younger, retracing the exact steps you had taken, even unthinking thoughts you had thought.

So, you exist from Birth till Death, alive in every moment, thinking that "This is NOW" every step of the way. But it's just an observation of one moment amongst many.

ehh time is annoying. it 's pesky. it's like a fly u want to swat out of the way.. booooo to time.

people who have done lsd all claim time is manmade. any research done to back this up?

I don't think time exists. I believe it is a tool that helps humans understand and rationalize change and movement.
'___' and other psychadelics provide a lot of insight into this, and maybe only for one reason. that reason being that when someone (A) is on '___' or mushrooms etc, and in a conversation with someone else (B), person A can leave the conversation for what B perceives as only a moment, but person A perceives as a massive amount of time, months even, and the concept of infinity can actually be grasped at this point. In this brief moment, person A can have hundreds of seperate thoughts or think out a few specific complex thoughts. This would normally not be able to occur.
we need to stop thinking of psychadelics as "drugs" but as tools that have been used for thousands and thousands of years.

People say time is man-made because it is interpreted by man. There once was some person (or more persons) who recognized time and made a calendar.

Some people believe our universe runs backwards. The Big Bang is the end, and now we are moving to the beginning.
That actually is impossible because man gave the definition to the word 'time' meaning that the Big Bang was first, because we experience it to be first. Therefore, 'time' is something with a manmade definitinon.
"Time" is just another dimension, like length, width and heigth and those other 7 dimensions quantum physics believe in...

Truth still remains, that time is simply in your mind, it only exists because you believe it does. It's a secundair dimension as I like to call it, a dimension you do not primarily move trough with your body, but with your mind, if you don't bother the time and do those fun things that allow you not to think of time, time goes fast. If you think of it, and you do bored things that makes you think of time (like when you bored, you constantly think, when is it going to be over), time goes slowly.

I said you do not primarily move trough time with your body, you do actually, but you wouldn't notice it. Your body ages and grows old because it also moves through this dimension.
But like walking through the mud and then walk back around it (in 3D), the mud will stay on your shoes. This simply means that what you did, can't be undone, if you smacked someone in the face you can go back in time (yet we don't know how), but he will still be smacked in the face. If you're body has aged, and you move back in time, you're body will still be aged.

Returning to your own time will indeed be in a diffrent universe. If person A sends person B to the year 1848 and tells the politics not to seperate church and politics, when person B returns the world would be diffrent, while person A would still walks the world where nothing happened, amd might not even see person B back again.

Glad to have pointed some things out

[edit on 8-6-2007 by Forest Lion]

Originally posted by Heronumber0
If you can travel at the speed of light, it goes quite slowly but unfortunately your body mass would become heavier and heavier the faster you go.

Possibly misleading..... none of this happens "to you" as such. I mean, if you measured your own mass and looked at your own watch, it would all appear to be just the same is it always was.

It is only to the observer who is stationary relative to you who would measure your mass as infinite and your time as static.

And of course, by correlation, your observations of the "stationary observer" would tell you that it was they who were in fact inifinite in mass and static in time (cos if you consider yourself stationary then they would appear to be the ones moving at the speed of light).

Cheers.

Take a look at this thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

It's title is Why Time Does Not Exist! and it encapsulates my thoughts on the matter. Which is to say, no. Newton came up with time that exists externally of any frames of reference (absolute time) as a fudge. The only reason we still use the concept is that it is useful. What we call time is simply duration.