An Argument Against Time
OR TIME ISN’T TIME, IT’S SIMPLY TIMING (with references)
Newton, Plato and others have said that time is a basic part of our external world the same way that gravity or space is.
Leibiz, Kant, Kabbalists and others have said it’s all in our minds, that time is not an actual thing.²
Aristotle believed that time correlated to movement. Stephen Hawking said that time had a beginning point.² Einstein said time is not fixed and that it’s the fourth dimension as well as an inextricable part of space.³
The theory of block time supposes that time is part of an unchanging four-dimensional “block”.⁴ Carlo Rovelli (quantum physicist) postulates that there’s no time at the smallest quantum levels, and that it only emerges at larger scales.⁵
There are many theories but no agreement. Lisa Randall (theoretical physicist) said in an interview, she thinks “no one understands time”.⁶
In other words, science doesn’t have a single clear sense of what time is.¹
Science steps around the essence of what time is by sticking to what it can agree on — clock-time, which is simply what a clock reads.⁷
I think there are two main points here that need to be brought together.
One is that time is a human concept, so yes it is in our heads.
Secondly, there is also something external, something that causes change, that makes clocks relevant and that ages things.
What I see is,
Time isn’t time, it’s simply timing.
And this timing, is the timing between things that are in motion.
And… science finds that everything every physical thing in our universe, from the subatomic to the galactic is in motion.⁹
The Fourth Dimension
The breakthrough, for me, came as a thought experiment about time (which is considered to be the fourth dimension).³
I imagined the line, the square and the cube of the three dimensions and then looked around . . . where was the 4th dimension?
I couldn’t find it. But then one day I got an intuition, I imagined reaching in and twirling the cube.
It was then that I realized my 3d cube had been completely stationary.
To make an accurate model of our universe we absolutely need . . . motion.
It’s much easier to find motion than to find time itself.
We may think that time is universal but what has been far less obvious to us is how universal motion is.
Universal Motion
Until Copernicus it was easy to think that the earth had no motion. But the earth has a constant spin as well as an orbit.
Until the discovery of molecular motion it was assumed that a rock lying in a field was motionless. But all its molecules are vibrating, as heat.¹⁰
Science shows us that everything is in motion
Even though it is not obvious to our senses, through science we know that everything is in motion; not just molecular or planetary motion but also the spin of galaxies, the expansion of the universe and one of the most interesting motions to me . . . quantum motion.
Quantum Motion
If you think there’s a lot of motion on the molecular level, check out what’s going on a couple steps down in the quantum level.
Matter and antimatter particles popping in and out of existence, quarks moving close to the speed of light , neutrinos whizzing through planets at nearly 186,000 miles/second, electrons orbiting at 2,200miles/second and beyond, photons and gluons cruising at the speed of light, particles being created and obliterated a million times /second.¹¹
If it sounds like chaos, in a way it is, but what’s odd is how reliable the outcome of the probabilities or the averages of this chaos are.
It is said that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory because it has never failed.¹²
In this overall way, this makes quantum the most consistent, most constant of motions. And it’s happening everywhere, even in “empty” space but we can’t see any of it, it’s much too small.
Is it just a coincidence that this motion is as ubiquitous, as steady, reliable and as invisible as we consider time to be?
Filling in the Blank
What this boils down to is, a large percentage of motion is invisible to us. All this invisible (and visible) motion has many interactions that cause many, many effects.
This means that for all the effects that our brain can see, it still can’t see most of the causes.
The internal, human sense of time arises because our brain still needs to make sense of all this somehow; so it fills in what it cannot see with a concept of how things flow and change.¹³
This is the concept that we call time.
Clock-time and Motion
Let’s go back and take a look at science’s clock-time. Clock-time is a concept that is based on motion. Twenty four hours of steady, reliable clock-time is made to replicate one steady, constant rotation of the earth.⁸
Let’s compare this with a couple of other concepts.
We use a concept of a pound, a fixed amount of weight that lets us compare the weight of other masses. Although it’s a completely made up concept, it gives us a steady, known, constant.
A mile is also a man-made concept. A consistent, known length of space that we can then use to measure other less known quantities of space.
Time is like this except that it’s squirrellier, it’s a moving measurement.
An hour is a concept, a steady, known and constant amount. But what we’re putting on the one side of the scale, is not time, it’s motion. It’s the consistent steady motions of the clock’s internal mechanism, or going back to the origins, it’s 1/24th of the spin of the earth.
Also, is a clock that’s slow measuring time?
Is a clock that’s fast measuring time?
Is a clock that has stopped, measuring time?
If there were no motion in anything, would we say time exists?
If there were no motion in anything except for one clock, is that clock still measuring time?
And, are clocks “slow” or “fast” compared to time itself?
Or compared to each other? Or more realistically, compared to the motion of the earth?
Is the rotation of the earth measuring time?
It may not be obvious at first but all of these things come down to motion.
We use constant, steady motions (of clocks, earth, moon or sun) to measure other less consistent motions.
How can a car go 60 miles per hour without time?
The car can be said to be going 60 miles from point A to point B in the same timing as 1/24th of a full rotation of the earth (or a full rotation of a minute hand on a clock). This is timing. The timing between the motion of a car and that of the earth.
Our timing could reference to the number of jumps a grasshopper makes or how many clouds come over a mountain, but these are not consistent and unlikely to hold true the next time the car goes from point A to point B at the exact same rate of speed.
Also it is worth noting that in a car, there is no clock as any part of the speedometer mechanism. The speedometer has a needle that can accurately register the speed without using time at all.¹⁷
But things age, we age, surely that’s due to time.
Let’s take a close look at the ageing of an old wooden fence post and “the effects of time”.
If we were to make a list of every single cause that has had an effect on that post: freezing-thawing, UV from sunlight, microorganisms, oxidation, etc., etc., etc. and put them in the order that they happened, we would have a very, very long list.
You may be surprised to find that time does not show up anywhere on this list, that it has no cause or effect.
Time has no direct cause or effect on anything.
In a way what we call “time” is the list itself, it is the sequential order or the timing in which everything changes.
One moment changing to another applies to more than just the old post aging, it applies to everything interacting and changing such that there is a kind of layering of a vast variety of causes and effects happening everywhere.
But when we boil all this down to one thing, what we find is motion not time.
Why do we experience everything as happening within time?
Firstly, it is difficult to engage our brains without using memory.
Memory is of the past (and can then be used to extrapolate the future).
This past-future perspective invariably gives us a sense of time.
Simply put, when we think, we see time.
And ever since we started as single cell organisms, day in and day out, season after season, for as long as there has been life on this planet, we’ve evolved under the constant influence of the reliable, steady motions of the earth, moon and sun.
Time is the most used noun in the English language.¹⁴
These timing references (or this sense of time) is embedded in our DNA, our psyches and our language.¹⁵
There’s no removing this sense of time.
The Arrow of Time¹⁶
The “arrow of time” is one of the arguments that’s used to uphold time.
The idea is that time goes in only one direction because you can’t unlight a match, for instance.
However, if we put a molecule of water inside a box and then remove some heat from it will freeze. We see this as time moving forward. Now if we reverse this add the heat back in and thaw the ice back into water, what has happened to time inside the box? Does time reverse inside the box?
If some motions go forward but others are reversed, does this slow down time?!?
The “arrow of time” makes sense if time is time. It doesn’t make so much sense, if time is actually motion.
In Short, Time isn’t Time, it’s Motion.
I think that if we use the scientific method to look for the causes that create the effects that we currently attribute to time, what we find is motion.
People often ask, does it really matter whether it’s time or motion?
In some ways it makes no difference, the same effects keep happening. However, the conceptual machinery of time can also get quite oppressive.
Everything being in motion has a kind of flow to it. This flow feels more alive and kinder than the concept we make about it.
More
If time is actually motion, it would change a rather esoteric thing.
Relativity’s space-time would become space-motion instead.
For more about a theory that arose from this and explains a lot about our universe,
please click here for “Quantum Context” or the older version “Underneath the Invisible Rock of Time is a Key ” on Medium.com.
Also, to see my time video on YouTube go to https://youtu.be/hAZRSWg627Y .
— — — — — — — — — — REFERENCES — — — — — — — — — — — — —
1) https://www.discovermagazine.com/
The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”
In the sciences generally, time is usually defined by its measurement: it is simply what a clock reads.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
In Philosophy, time was questioned throughout the centuries; what time is and if it is real or not.
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers.
2 One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe — a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[55][56]
2.1) The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of “container” that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[13] and Immanuel Kant,[57][58] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled. Plato believed that time was made by the Creator at the same instant as the heavens. According to Kabbalists, “time” is a paradox[53] and an illusion.[54] Both the future and the past are recognized to be combined and simultaneously present.
2.2) Aristotle believed that time correlated to movement, that time did not exist on its own but was relative to motion of objects.
Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo ruminates on the nature of time, asking, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”
Isaac Newton said that we are merely occupying time, he also says that humans can only understand relative time.[69] Relative time is a measurement of objects in motion.[69] The anti-realists believed that time is merely a convenient intellectual concept for humans to understand events.[69] This means that time was useless unless there were objects that it could interact with, this was called relational time.[69] René Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume said that one’s mind needs to acknowledge time, in order to understand what time is.[63] Immanuel Kant believed that we can not know what something is unless we experience it first hand.[70]
Stephen Hawking, he says that space and imaginary time are finite but have no boundaries.[75] Imaginary time is not real or unreal, it is something that is hard to visualize.[75] Philosophers can agree that physical time exists outside of the human mind and is objective, and psychological time is mind-dependent and subjective.
Although time is regarded as an abstract concept, there is increasing evidence that time is conceptualized in the mind in terms of space.[97] That is, instead of thinking about time in a general, abstract way, humans think about time in a spatial way and mentally organize it as such. Using space to think about time allows humans to mentally organize temporal events in a specific way.
2.3) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
Plato and Newton who think that time is independent of the events that occur in time believe in “absolute time”
J.M.E. McTaggart argued that there is in fact no such thing as time, and that the appearance of a temporal order to the world is a mere appearance. Other philosophers before and since (including, especially, F.H. Bradley) have argued for the same conclusion.
3) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Minkowski
Hermann Minkowski, his idea of combining the three dimensions of physical space with that of time into a four-dimensional “Minkowski space” — space-time — laid the mathematical foundations for Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
3.1) https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fourth-dimension
In physics, the fourth dimension is time. The other three dimensions, which exist in space, are length, width, and height.
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
“block time” or “block universe” theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional “block”, as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time.
5) https://www.discovermagazine.com/
Rovelli “What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable — time, which itself is not observable — we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”
By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale.
5.1) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-15/stephen-hawking-s-great-achievement-making-sense-of-time
Hawking proposed a view of time that, like an everlasting tapestry, stretches from past to present to future, with a definite beginning at the big bang.
6) On Being with Krista Tippett podcast interview, November 12, 2015, Dark Matter, Dinasaurs and Extra Dimensions.
Lisa Randall: “Oh, I would just say nobody understands time.”
Krista Tippett: “That nobody understands time?”
Lisa Randall: “Yeah.”
7) https://iep.utm.edu/time/
Time is what a clock is used to measure. Information about time tells the durations of events, and when they occur, and which events happen before which others. So, time plays a very significant role in the universe’s structure and in the structure of our personal lives. Nevertheless, there are many unresolved issues, both philosophical and scientific.
7) Time in physics is operationally defined as “what a clock reads”.
The operational definition of time does not address what the fundamental nature of it is.
A day is usually 24 hours or 86,400 seconds in length.
The Mean Solar Time system defines the second as 1/86,400 of the mean solar day, which is the year-average of the solar day. The solar day is the time interval between two successive solar noons.
8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
Civil time is defined to agree with the rotation of the Earth. The international standard for timekeeping is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This time scale “ticks” the same atomic seconds as TAI, but inserts or omits leap seconds as necessary to correct for variations in the rate of rotation of the Earth.[5]
The second (symbol: s, also abbreviated: sec[1]) is the base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) (French: Système International d’unités), commonly understood and historically defined as 1⁄86400 of a (24 hour) day.
A set of atomic clocks throughout the world keeps time by consensus: the clocks “vote” on the correct time, and all voting clocks are steered to agree with the consensus, which is called International Atomic Time (TAI). TAI “ticks” atomic seconds.[4]
A time scale in which the seconds are not exactly equal to atomic seconds is UT1, a form of universal time. UT1 is defined by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the sun, and does not contain any leap seconds.[6] UT1 always differs from UTC by less than a second.
8.1) https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/newsflash-time-may-not-exist
“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion
As there is no absolute frame of reference, absolute motion cannot be determined.[1] Thus, everything in the universe can be considered to be in motion.[2]: 20–21
9) https://www.sciencefocus.com › Space
Everything in the Universe is in motion because forces exist in the Universe. The gravitational force and the electromagnetic force ensure large objects are in motion while the weak and strong nuclear forces ensure the quantum world is constantly in motion.
9) https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1772/are-all-objects-in-motion
all objects are in motion with respect to some other object and none of them are superior frames of reference due to Special Relativity. Also, you may think of the expansion of the universe. Everything in the universe that is far enough is moving away from every observer in the universe in a macroscopic scale.
10) In 1827, the English botanist Robert Brown noticed that pollen seeds suspended in water moved in an irregular “swarming” motion.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201608/physicshistory.cfm#:~:text=August%201827%3A%20Robert%20Brown%20and,suspended%20in%20a%20stationary%20liquid.
10) https://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/atoms/states.html
gas molecules vibrate and move freely at high speeds. liquid molecules vibrates, move about, and slide past each other. solid molecules vibrate (jiggle) but generally do not move from place to place.
11) https://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive/archive_2013/today13-02-01_NutshellReadmore.html
At the quantum level, matter and antimatter particles are constantly popping into existence and popping back out, with an electron-positron pair here and a top quark-antiquark pair there.
11.1) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/110923-neutrinos-speed-of-light-particles-cern-physics-einstein-science#:~:text=Neutrinos%20are%20subatomic%20particles%20that,(299%2C338%20kilometers)%20a%20second.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have almost no mass and can zip through entire planets as if they are not there. Being nearly massless, neutrinos should travel at nearly the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles (299,338 kilometers) a second.Sep 24, 2011
11.2) https://www.scirp.org/html/12-7502384_60688.htm
The quarks, which are the components of protons and neutrons, move back and forth at a speed close to the speed of light, and in random directions.
11.2) https://physics.aps.org/story/v22/st11
quarks move so fast inside each neutron–close to the speed of light
11.3) https://education.jlab.org/qa/electron_01.html#:~:text=A%20calculation%20shows%20that%20the,in%20just%20over%2018%20seconds. A calculation shows that the electron is traveling at about 2,200 kilometers per second. That’s less than 1% of the speed of light, but it’s fast enough to get it around the Earth in just over 18 seconds
11.4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon
Photons are massless, so they always move at the speed of light in vacuum, 299792458 m/s (or about 186,282 mi/s).
11.4) https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/science/physics/concepts/gluon#:~:text=Gluons%20are%20massless%2C%20travel%20at,negative%20charges%E2%80%94three%20anticolor%20varieties.
Gluons are massless, travel at the speed of light
11.5) https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem
Researchers have observed spontaneous transformations between particles and their antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay
12) https://www.astro.umd.edu/~miller/teaching/astr320/lecture21.pdf
Quantum mechanics is the most successful quantitative theory ever produced. Not a single one of the untold thousands of experiments done to test it has ever found the basic principles to be in error, and the agreement can sometimes go to ten significant figures
13) https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/20978285/optical-illusion-science-humility-reality-polarization
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”
Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.
13) https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/taming-the-brain-0228125/
Did you know that your brain regularly fills in for missing information, much of the time without your even knowing that this is going on?
13) https://neurosciencenews.com/neuroimaging-visual-processing-fmri-1150/
Researchers at Radboud University use visual illusions to demonstrate to what extent the brain interprets visual signals. They were surprised to discover that active interpretation occurs early on in signal processing. In other words, we see not only with our eyes, but with our brain, too.
13) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124214-your-brain-fills-gaps-in-your-hearing-without-you-realising/
Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising
13 https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-consume-information/
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14) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5104778.stm#:~:text=The%20word%20%22time%22%20is%20the,snapshot%20of%20our%20everyday%20language.
The word “time” is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary.
15) https://www.ntnu.edu/how-your-brain-experiences-time
Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have discovered a network of brain cells that express our sense of time within experiences and memories. — This network provides timestamps to events and keeps track of the order of events within an experience, says Professor Edvard Moser.
15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#:~:text=The%20study%20of%20time%20perception,indefinite%20and%20unfolding%20of%20events.
time perception or chronoception is a field within psychology, cognitive linguistics[1] and neuroscience that refers to the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone’s own perception of the duration of the indefinite and unfolding of events.
Though directly experiencing or understanding another person’s perception of time is not possible, perception can be objectively studied and inferred through a number of scientific experiments.
15) https://www.bu.edu/articles/2013/what-is-time
what Eichenbaum found particularly interesting happened during the “empty” delay period, when the rats were deprived of external stimuli. There, while some firings matched the pattern associated with the task at hand, others (about a third) did not.
“They fired at different moments,” says Eichenbaum. “Some fired when the rat first walked in, some in the next second, some in the third second, some in the fourth. If you look at all the cells, you see something that looks like ticks of a clock, like they are pacing through the empty period of time. It looks like time is being filled up.”
15.1) https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2019.00005
Sunlight is detected by special light-detecting cells, called ipRGCs, at the back of the eye. The ipRGCs send signals to the SCN in the brain. These signals are processed to coordinate the clocks within every cell in the body, so that they are synchronized with the light-dark cycle.
15.1) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/press-release/
For many years we have known that living organisms, including humans, have an internal, biological clock that helps them anticipate and adapt to the regular rhythm of the day.
15.1) https://www.nature.com/articles/nm0999_983
In a random sample of normal adults, a single nucleotide polymorphism located in the 3' flanking region of the human CLOCK gene was correlated with morningness–eveningness preferences.5 It is remarkable that a phenotypic trait as complex as sleep-time preference (chronotype) could be influenced by polymorphisms of a single gene.
15.1) https://www.science.org/content/article/does-dna-determine-bedtime
Many natural rhythms, such as preferred mealtimes and body temperature, are at the mercy of the circadian clock, a system involving at least nine genes that keep our bodies in sync with the 24-hour, light-dark cycle.
15.2) https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/
How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
15.2) https://neurosciencenews.com/event-memory-order-14724/
A new theory and model helps explain how entorhinal time ramping cells produce hippocampal time cells. The hippocampal cells allow for memory association between places and people to help recall event sequences.
15.2) https://interestingengineering.com/how-our-brains-create-timelines-of-the-past
These memories get stored as groups of neurons that are arranged or primed to fire together in the same pattern every time.
16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
Time appears to have a direction — the past lies behind, fixed and immutable, while the future lies ahead and is not necessarily fixed. Yet for the most part, the laws of physics do not specify an arrow of time, and allow any process to proceed both forward and in reverse.
16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_space_and_time
The problem of the direction of time arises directly from two contradictory facts. Firstly, the fundamental physical laws are time-reversal invariant; if a cinematographic film were taken of any process describable by means of the aforementioned laws and then played backwards, it would still portray a physically possible process. Secondly, our experience of time, at the macroscopic level, is not time-reversal invariant.
17) https://www.britannica.com/technology/speedometer
A speedometer indicates speed via a circular permanent magnet that rotates 1,000 revolutions per mile of vehicle travel. This motion is initiated by a flexible shaft driven by gears at the rear of the transmission. The magnet turns within a movable metal cup made of a light nonmagnetic metal that is attached to the shaft carrying the indicating pointer. The magnetic circuit is completed by a circular stationary field plate surrounding the movable cup. As the magnet rotates, it exerts a magnetic drag on the movable cup that tends to turn it against the restraint of a spiral spring. The faster the magnet rotates, the greater the pull on the cup and the pointer. The speed-indicating dial is graduated in either miles per hour or kilometers per hour.
