Time isn't real, clocks are

When you're asked the question, what time is it? They expect you to answer with a number, correct? That number comes from a clock, which was made by humans, using a formula, based on the earths rotational sequence position. Time does not exist, all that exists is the Present and The Future, the past no longer exists, it remains just as a variable determining your current standing point in the present, and possibly even effecting your future.

Without time (the clock), without a schedule, questions like "when?" wouldn't be used, because the answer would always be "the past", because that's when, it was in the past. But now you say 5 o'clock, because the past, happens to be labeled as 5 o'clock in the past, because clocks exist.

Without a clock though, how would we be able to meet people in the future, they would be like, let's meet... in the future, but that doesn't narrow it down enough, because a second in front of you is the future, and a second later it becomes the present.

If time existed, we would be able to alter it, we would be able to move it backwards, move it forwards, or slow or speed it down. You would be able to turn a clock back, and go back into the past, but you can't, because it isn't real, and it isn't physical. It just doesn't exist.

My point: Time isn't real, clocks are, they are just there to keep us on schedule. The reason why most people don't even know this, is because we've percieved it as a reality, due to relying on it sense birth.

There could just be some way to alter your perception of time, so that it becomes more apparent.

[edit on 22-11-2007 by ieatfungus5]

You have a common misconception about the nature of "time" that many do and I did as well until reading further.

According to relativity (I do not remember if it was General of Special that states this) all matter and energy is moving at light speed. The majority of this motion is through the fourth time dimension and the rest is through the three space dimensions.

Physics gives time as a "+1" dimension to the number of space dimensions that exist (be it 3 as we are aware of or 10 as M theory calls for).

Researching the "Arrow of Time" may help clear things up a bit more as well. According to physics, everything should work just as well going backwards in time as it does going forwards. The reason we can give names like backwards and forwards is due to entropy, or the fact that as time passes everything becomes less orderly.

Time is certainly very real. There is even a theory about "time quanta" that states that time is made up of divisible units much like matter or energy.

The human division of time into units, though, is certainly completely arbitrary and you are correct there.

[edit on 22-11-2007 by evanmontegarde]

keep going guys, i'm lovin' this... and i'm sure everyone else is too..

time controls what we do. time drives us.

Good thoughts here ATS'ers.

My question, how does time fit in to the existance of our universe? Has the universe always been here in some shape or form? Could it be that before the universe there was nothing but somehow atoms suddenly appeared out of the void and got things going?

reply to post by jboogienoj


I have thought of this before and I first strongly agreed but then I read something not related to quantum jumps. It says that an quarks and smaller particles don't have an infinitesimally small length of measure as in you can measure it up to .0000000001 but not with 20 million zeros because they move in intervals as in it instantaneously goes from one location to another without traversing the space in between. Although it could still be possible that time really doesn't exist. It was only theorized from Einstein's work. However it seems that now Einstein is about to be dethroned from his theories as String theory comes onto the mainstream.

I would simply say time is perspective to measure motion, or rather measure "change." Everything is constantly changing and in a state of motion. Quite chaotic.

Time is relative to Earth time. If humans ever travel to other worlds, means of measuring times will change. For example, Martian days will be different from the 24 hour system we have on Earth. It is interesting to note that even ways of measuring time varies here on Earth. As an example, the 12 month system we use is Christian, you know that, right? We are in the year 2007 AD, because Christians decided when AD time would start. Jews, religiously, are in a different year. It can be confusing, I guess . But, yes, time is all relative and it was invented, not discovered.




[edit on 24-11-2007 by they see ALL]

Invented, not discovered, meaning it isn't real. I ingested some sort of acid, be it lysergic or hydrochloric, I forgot, but at that point I knew time wasn't real and I was relying on it assuming it was real. It's man made, christian made and not real. Time is what we think it is, not what it is, and we only think it is because the clock says so, and the clock has always been right, sense we were born... How could we doubt something thats been real our whole lives?

Well time is what we think it is. I use three different time measures to be able to function. I use the traditional method of counting calendar days, months, years, hours, minutes, and seconds because I am bound within the world who happens to believe in this. If I do not pay tribute to this system, I would not be able to hold a job, use some forms of money, etc.

The second form of time I use is my personal time. This is the time that I do not count by a clock anytime I am not using the traditional method. This includes when I am going to the bathroom, working on building a bird house, or writing this post for ATS.

The final time I go by is long term time. This too is not specifically recorded for me on a clock, although it could be because it is historic. I tend to compile events in life in chronological order, yet not necessarily as a linear function, just in the order they happened and significance. This is another calender or time count I go by, for a reference.

So the clock is only one method to believe in time, but not necessarily necessary.

Time has existed since existence has existed.

Some of time is merely a psychological effect but much of time is based around our real world experiences. Things live and die in measurable cycles. The sun sets and rises in fairly predictable fashion. The changing seasons for untold years was a major threat to survival. These things create a very real sense of time.

It's worth nothing that the vast majority of time occurred before clocks existed, before the internet and before humans declared that time doesn't exist.

Time is the distance the earth travels around the sun. If you make it 18 times around the sun, you get to vote. Time is kind an absurd idea but it is a necessary to identify the location of objects in motion.

reply to post by rhombus24


I would disagree with that.

I would tend to believe that because our ability to measure space and movement are limited ... that things appear to not travel space and instantly jump ... but it is all perspective. Our keyboard ... it appears still. Even under a microscope, it appears still ... but we 'know' that the atoms are not still ... even as a solid, they move, and what they are made of move at great speeds.

Just because we can't measure, doesn't mean it is as we currently see it at all. By the human eye, galaxies don't move, don't spin ... but we 'know' that they do.

Remember, it is all perspective. As is time. The past does exist, just not reachable by our means. Whether it is ever reachable, well, you dive into theoretical physics.

If you claim the past doesn't exist, neither does the future .... if we have no past and no future, how is there a now ... so we don't really exist.

Whether boundaries are defined as any man has laid them can be debated. At current tech and knowledge, we don't see us passing the speed of light by ship in space travel ... BUT, we have all traveled faster than light ... since we have learned how to slow light down so much as to stop it.

So, just because a man said it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, doesn't make it so ... just because a man says a quark instantly jumps from one point to another, doesn't make it so. If you watched film frame frame, we all jump through space in a non-fluid motion ... but that is really only a problem with the information available (limited frame rate) ... which even our eyes have a limit on its ability to process information (as we definitely don't see or hear a majority of either spectrum).

If you consider we have found the ability to slow down and stop light, something that would have been unfathomable centuries ago, just think what a future group of intelligent minds may do with gravity, magnetism ... and one day time.

Whether time is a fourth dimension (or higher), transversable, or just a unalterable and unseeable constant is yet unknown. Time would still exist in some form, even if there wasn't clocks and our sphere didn't revolve and rotate. It would just be defined differently, from a different perspective and set of values.

So what about the people who have been trying to make time machines? time wasted or what?

Originally posted by ieatfungus5
When you're asked the question, what time is it? They expect you to answer with a number, correct? That number comes from a clock, which was made by humans, using a formula, based on the earths rotational sequence position. Time does not exist, all that exists is the Present and The Future, the past no longer exists, it remains just as a variable determining your current standing point in the present, and possibly even effecting your future.

Without time (the clock), without a schedule, questions like "when?" wouldn't be used, because the answer would always be "the past", because that's when, it was in the past. But now you say 5 o'clock, because the past, happens to be labeled as 5 o'clock in the past, because clocks exist.

Without a clock though, how would we be able to meet people in the future, they would be like, let's meet... in the future, but that doesn't narrow it down enough, because a second in front of you is the future, and a second later it becomes the present.

If time existed, we would be able to alter it, we would be able to move it backwards, move it forwards, or slow or speed it down. You would be able to turn a clock back, and go back into the past, but you can't, because it isn't real, and it isn't physical. It just doesn't exist.

My point: Time isn't real, clocks are, they are just there to keep us on schedule. The reason why most people don't even know this, is because we've percieved it as a reality, due to relying on it sense birth.

There could just be some way to alter your perception of time, so that it becomes more apparent.

[edit on 22-11-2007 by ieatfungus5]

quite precise interpretation of time!!!
respect for that!!!

most widely used example used is light to describe phenomenons in this sense, so i'll use it to for this.

in the past you would be regarded as a loonatic if you would say something like there are colors much hotter than red and much colder than violet, ie: infrared and ultraviolet. they did not existed but we did observe the heat of the sun on our faces, in fact we managed to differentiate between colors. and after that (im a designer, i know what i am saying) we still regard colors as a sensation, not some physical thing. if you have a room with 100 people, and if you shout out loud RED!!! having some way to read the color in those 100 minds, you will get 101 (you included) different shades of red. so you might say that colors are not real. the spectrum is just the "clock" by witch we measure it.

it is typical human nature to say of something that we dont understand that it dose not exist. the fact is that it dose, but we know very little about it.

"the real knowledge lies within realizing that you know nothing."
(forgot who sad it,.. Einstein i think)

Time is real
We just learnt to measure it in terms of locally observable things.

Throw away your clocks and calendar and 30 sunrises from now will you not be about a month older? IE your body goes through a progressive series of changes from birth to death with no reference to mechanical time measuring devices. The most primitive measures of it were summers, moons and days (handy for knowing when to plant the crop or get ready for the migrating herd to come through) but the modern world has split those up into much smaller increments for the purpose of more accurate measurement of processes and speeds, acceleration etc which makes accurate predictions of location possible.

Had our ancestors been decimally inclined we might be using millimonths and microdays as standard measurements to determine when to leave home to catch the bus on time.

I think there's a very fundamental flaw in this reasoning and it can be summed up by this - The map is not the territory.

You've lost me completely when the premise is that time doesn't exist because clocks are a human invention used to measure it.

Rulers are a man-made device. Units of any measure are a man-made construct. Does that mean that heat, mass, length don't exist? A thermometer is a human invention and the concept of "degrees" (Kelvin, Farenheit, Celsius) don't exist independently in nature. It's just a human way of quantifying physical properties. Do the properties themselves exist absent the instrumentation needed to measure them? Well, yes.

Are feet, inches, kilograms, degrees "real"? Yes, as universally agreed upon units of measure. Like seconds, months, years. Just because someone came up with the inch or centimeter or spring scale doesn't mean that the physical properties described by them don't exist separately from the description. The map is not the territory.

originally posted by ieatfungus5
There could just be some way to alter your perception of time, so that it becomes more apparent.

Isn't this contradictory? If your premise is time doesn't exist, how can your perception of it be altered? Assuming we're talking about physical perception here. You're saying we can physically perceive (correctly or erroneously) that which doesn't exist?

You can't kill time without doing irreparable damage to eternity. >Just thought I'd throw that in there - a little tongue in cheek<

Read up a little on semantics and semiotics. Maybe some epistemology. Interesting stuff.

Time is nothing more than a mental manifestation of a thought. Therefore it can be bent at any point in a sequence of events.

"The world revolves around ideas not time"

We have used time to gauge our results. But maybe the closest thing to eternity would be the end of time.

Which we will be experiencing. Little by little our world will open up and get larger in the results of learning thoughts create form.


'The closer our thoughts come to eternity the less time we will experience'




[edit on 27-11-2007 by menguard]

Very, very interesting.

Imagine this, you are sitting in space, watching the light from a star travel to earth. You see it at every instance. It has traveled through space. You are aware of the elapsed period it took to travel and watched it while it did travel.

The question is does the past exist, does the future exist? Did it travel through space and time only to arrive at a future earth? Or was it's existence wrapped in the "now", every tiny millisecond it moved.
You can clearly see where and when it came from so it's existence before it's ever present now is verified. It did take time to travel.

Space and time seem to be part and parcel to each other. I believe time exists and has a measurement, but that we live in the now. If our perspective or state could be modified perhaps this could change, but I think we are very far from that intelligence or knowledge.

I try to make sure my efforts go for something because of this. Knowing whether time exists or not, my body grows older on it's own cycle and I hope at "the end of the day" I have accomplished something.

Mtmind