Is Time Really Invariant?

Is it really as constant and even- flowing as we think it is?

My husband and I, among other people, have noticed that we often have the distinct feeling that an hour or even a few seem to be "missing" or "added", as if time had gone too fast or slow.

This has absolutely nothing in common with the normal perception of "time flying when you're having fun" or "minutes ticking slowly by" in boredom or while awaiting something. We are often doing completely different things in different areas of the house and are shocked when we agree that the clock seems to be "wrong".

Does anybody else experience this on a regular basis?

I would say it happens to us about twice a month, 70% with "missing" time, 30% with "added" time.

I'd be very interested to hear other people's experiences and opinions on this phenomenon! Thanks

in general i believe time is a concept that we manufactured to help us understand our reality. my personal belief is that there is no time as we know it. i guess it would be like comparing a strip of movie film to actually watching it on tv. if you look at the film it's 2-dimensional. you can look forward and back and see what happened a few frames back and what will happen a few frames ahead - think of this as how we conventionally consider time. when you actually VIEW the movie it's just a series of constantly overlapping images. this is sort of how i think of time. it's just us in a singular point of existence and things just happen around us.

Personally I've never believed that time flows at a constant rate, perhaps because the first quote from Einstein that I ever heard was "time is relative", if indeed he ever said that, and my parents weren't paraphrasing.

The idea of time as constant (absolute time) is a fudge, it is purely hypothetical, the same as Newtonian absolute space. They are used to give a frame of reference in which to calculate the movements of bodies with mass.

Even radioactive decay is variable, along with the orbit of the earth around the sun. Here's an article thats worth reading:

Russian scientists discover unexpected regularities in radioactive decay, linked to astronomical cycles
Two years ago, nearly unnoticed in the West, the Russian biophysicist S.E. Shnoll published a paper in the prominent Russian physics journal Uspekhi Fisicheskikh Nauk1 summing up the results of more than three decades of investigations of anomalous statistical regularities in a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological processes, from radioactive decay to the rates of biochemical reactions.

The evidence points unambiguously to the existence of a previously unknown relationship between fluctuations in the rates of radioactive and other processes in the laboratory, and major astronomical cycles, including the day, month, and year. The implication is, that many phenomena which until now have been regarded as purely statistical in character—such as the distribution of fluctuations in the momentary rates of radioactivity measured in a sample—are somehow controlled or at least strongly influenced by an astrophysical factor, which varies in time in the same way at all points on the Earth.

Source:www.21stcenturysciencetech.com...

I was in a coma for five days and when i became conscious i had no idea what amount of time had passed, time is constant but the rate at which we percieve it can vary

Interesting topic. It all rotates around how you or humans define time?

Because if you look at a clock 'ticking', it will keep 'ticking' and moving at the same speed so you would think time is a constant measure would you not.

But yes, time has been made up, as have days, months and years so that we have some sort of structure to our lives and so we can plan ahead. Without time as we know it (remembering time does effect, days months and years) the World would go crazy. Crazy as in there would be no structure, businesses wouldn't know what to do with shipments delivering at a certain time etc. The stock market would stand still.

Also if time is different for different people because of their perceptions, how can people meet at a certain place on time?

Time was we know it was mathematically chosen because of the length of time it takes up to rotate the sun. That's the science behind it which gave us our year. I don't know how recent it was in our history that we came to the conclusion that 12 months equal an Earth year, but I'm sure somebody can find that out.

Time is an interesting topic as it opens and shuts many doors and theories if manipulated well. Time travel, worm holes, other dimensions are all linked with manipulating time. Does manipulating time hold the key to other physical realms?

If you stare at a clock for 24 hours straight, I assure you it will not change it's speed in any way. It may have a few momentary hiccups due to mechanics where the clock itself, but that will not change the global time set by humans.

However if you are referring to a more real form of time, it changes every day as the seasons change and the days become longer or shorter from our point of view. But it still takes the Earth the same amount of time to go around the Sun. It's been happening for millions of years, so I doubt there is a huge amount of variance any more.

If you read he article that I linked to above, you will see that not only does the passage of the Earth around the sun vary, but even radioactive decay is variable, even the atomic clocks that are the most reliable form of timekeeping we have do not necessarily run at a constant speed. Wile you may not be able to detect the variability from staring at a clock all day, it does happen. How on Earth would you be able to keep track of the consistency of the seconds being ticked away, anyway?

isn't time "movement through space"?

i have definitely experienced chunks of time skewed or missing for sure, but haven't put a ton of thought into it. just figured it was prolly an abduction.

Here is an interesting test to try. When you are alone, quiet yourself and put and old style clock with a sweeping second-hand in front of you. While watching the second hand practicing sensing or perceiving the space between the seconds. It is a kind of like time displacement, if that's what you want to call it.

I have practiced this technique off and on for years and it seems to give me a sense of the eternal that exists in between the seconds. I'm sure this is a subjective experience and lends itself to all sorts of interpretations, but is a unique experience non-the-less.
Just thought I would throw that out there.

The faster you go, the slower events happen around you. Gravity affects time as well. In an average 2 story house, time goes slower/faster (can't remember), in the attic by 0.0052 nanoseconds or somewhere around there. So time is relative. Fun to think about.

I personally believe time is completely relative.

I don't know the details, but isn't it true that if someone were to go into space and travel faster than the speed of light and then come back, a great amount of time would have passed on Earth but they wouldn't have aged at all? In other words, what might seem like minutes or hours to them would actually equal years on Earth.

Also, someone used the example of staring at an old fashioned clock for 24 hours and watching the second hand move. Has anyone actually tried this? I bet by the time you get within a few hours of the full 24, the seconds are going to feel much longer than they did when you first started.

I guess it really is just a matter of opinion. If by time, you mean the speed of the second hand on a clock or the number of revolutions around the sun, then you could say it is invariant. But if you were to lock two people in separate dark rooms with no windows and told them both to count off the seconds and come out in exactly 24 hours, there's no way they would both come out at exactly the same instant a day later. It all depends on your perception of time.

On a final note, there are some societies who have very little concept of time other than day and night. They don't schedule things throughout the day like we do in the western world. Instead, they finish their work when they are done and do things whenever they need to be done.

I think Stephen Hawking or someone equally famous said it:

Time is a way to keep everything from happening at once.

So perhaps sometimes it doesn't quite work, and we experience that.

Well considering time, we humans only have around 5 billion years left to think of an idea to save humanity, before our sun blows itself up...

So in my opinion time is important