What is Time???

[Joseph1082]

This is kind of a spin-off thread from the one on time travel.
Anyway, simple question, what is time?
Simply defined, is it change or our measure of change as things change. According to relativity time is the forth dimention, one in addition to length, width, and height, and a fundamental measurement like those quantities. What do you guys think?

[loismustdie]

time- the one thing that contains and binds everyone and everything, the duration in which all things, people, events, etc... take place

it is not a series of events, because time cannot be broken up into segments, because by its laws everything has or will have a beggining and an end, nothing could have existed forever and nothing will(in it's current state); therefore since it contains everything time must be infinite.

but infinite is not a relative term, once we believed that the universe was infinite, and some people still do, but it is extremely hard to imagine and ending to the universe(different thread), so there may be an inconcievable ending to time.....

[Steel]

Time is something we made up in our minds to help dealing with life. It does not exist.

[YogsVR4]

It another diminsion of the universe that we cannot fathom as we are only three dimensional creatures.

[MBTN]

Like steel said, time is just something WE need in our lives. It's just a measurement.

[xviciousx]

I'm with Steel on this one... it's like a yardstick we use to measure our lives.

[Firebird]

"time is what the clock says" -Albert Einstein

This pretty much sums up the idea of time very much like what steel has already said we use time to help us deal with life. However, much like what loismustdie said it is something that exists whether or not you choose to call it "time". Our life is a fixed unit. Everything is governed by it and it is something inescapable.

[Joseph1082]

See, "Time"... seconds, minuets, hours, to me is just our way of quantifying the magnitude of change. Whether we were here are not, I still think time would exist. If the beginning of time is the "big-bang" then perhaps time is the gradual steady change of the universe from its beginning state to its future state (notice i said future state, not end state, so as not to imply the universe has an end or a finite temporal existence). But alas, from this form it is then extremely hard to say how time is a dimention comparable to length or width? I posted this question because I would say it is the hardest, or one of the hardest, we could ever try to answer. And YogsVR4, wouldn't you say we are 4-dimentional because we have length, depth, height, and time-span?

[jon@af]

Time is something we never do what we should with and always complain we never have enough of. As has been said, simply a measurement; nothing more nothing less. How do we measure a day? with 24 hours. How do we measure those hours? with minutes, and so on and so on.

[loismustdie]

i just thought of somthing........

in stephen hawking's book, "the universein a nutshell"- he says that the the universe was at a single singularity, and since it had infinite mass, it had infinite gravity, and then with infinite gravity time would stop, but since time holds and bounds everything, and the only was for time to exist is for it to be measuring something, so since there is nothing for it to measure(e.g. hours, mins.) becuase of the singularity, time itself would not exist and therefore nothing would exist........damn i'm good





p.s. i'm probly just full of shit

[Joseph1082]

If you think about it, you just also stated the situation we were discussing earlier when and if an object travels at the speed of light... infinite mass, infinite gravity, 0 length, 0 time. So at the begining of the universe was every traveling at the speed of light... in a manner of speaking. Maybe that is where the energy for the big-bang came from.

[raysoh8]

"time" is an english word

an english word is made up by man

so im with einstein on this..

hey look at this "ahh mummy i can see this invisible stuff floating around thats called time!!!"

[loismustdie]

well, i don't believe that the big bang is what started the universe, i believe that god created it in its current state several million years ago, but i don't want this thread to start a fired debate over the origin of the universe.........

so i guess if the situation that i presented would happen, then i hope that nothing ever reaches the speed of light.........

[Joseph1082]

that is interesting, LMD, contrary to my belief in physics, I also believe that God created the universe... just becuase 20th, 21st century physics has a lot of unanswered questions, yet 'God" can never be an answer, but i think it is. There is only one answer to the question of how could SOMETHING come from NOTHING...God!

[raysoh8]

you know 80% of the threads that started out as good discussions get locked soon after religion is introduced