What is time? We are seemingly embedded within and surrounded by this thing we call time. But what, really, is its nature? Is time a fundamental property of the universe, a kind of illusion, or something else entirely? Explore this fascinating subject with Turtles All the Way Down!
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------CONTENTS-----
0:00 Introduction
0:50 Difficulty in fully explaining time
1:22 A definition of time
1:59 Early concepts of time
2:26 General Relativity and Spacetime
3:47 Time as another dimension
6:48 Distinguishing the past, present, and future
8:40 What is existence?
9:47 Presentism
10:45 Growing Block View
11:10 Eternalism (Block Universe)
12:08 Perception of the Flow of Time
12:57 The illusion of the flow of time
13:12 Neuroscience and time's flow
14:43 Conclusion
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Links to my 3 books on physics:
Volume 1:
"Everyone's Field Guide to Physics: Volume I: The Familiar World": www.amazon.com/Everyones-Fiel...
Volume 2:
"Everyone's Field Guide to Physics: Volume II: The Ethereal Trinity": www.amazon.com/Everyones-Fiel...
Volume 3:
"Everyone's Field Guide to Physics: Volume III: The Unfamiliar World": www.amazon.com/Everyones-Fiel...
great video! such an interesting topic! 💛
Time is the memory of the present turning into past. So time is present disappearing.
Really nice video as always! Continue with these topics. This channel will blow up soon:))
Thanks, I appreciate it!
The example in the video of the yellow dot moving in 1 then 2 then three dimensions in order to introduce the concept a 4th dimension; time, is fundamentally wrong. Take the example of one dimension, for the yellow dot to move left, right requires time. So in the image of 1 dimensional space time already exists hence it's really 2 dimensions, remove time and the dot cannot move. So we have 1 dimension, a dot that cannot move in any direction other than through time, two dimensions where the dot can move along a line left & right, 3 dimensions left right, forward, back and 4 dimensions all the others and up down. This may be pedantic, but it removes the necessity of trying to illustrate a four dimensional space.
There is no present, what we experience as the present is the immediate past. point to anything that you think is happening now, and it happened in the past. What we consider the present, the point at which the past meets the future does not exist of itself, only as the the point at which the past meets the future.
Thank you! It's a fascinating topic to research.
There are many things wrong in this video; a point and a line have no dimensions; a plane a has no dimension. Clocks have nothing to do with time nor do they have anything with the measurement of time for what does an unwound clock have to do with time or measurement of it? Time does not move or flow. If it flowed or moved we would see the movement of time or we would see the flow of time or be able to detect these displacements. Time has no direction or directions. Time travel is impossible because it would also imply space or place. You can't move in time without a place. So, if you could move in time to the before Bong Bang, where would you find yourself? Time travel is impossible because even if you could move in time then you would affect the surroundings immediately even on molecular level and you would change the outcome. The video does not post the definition of time at all. Time is static as if to say it's always Always. Time is static wheras entropy is not and entropy is not an indication of time. Spacetime is an erroneous way of describing the ''present''. Static time is actually not a full member of space. ''Always'' can exist with no space or a conscious observer. All mathematical expressions denoting time as ''t'' are not true representations of what the equations convey because we have no definition of time.
Time is not phisical, In Phisics time is just a relation between a ciclycal and a discret movement, so the only thing the relativity points out is that the distancies are nota the sime in different space geometry
Glad I clicked on your video out of the many choices AI threw at me today. Halfway through I decided to subscribe. Looking forward to watching more.
Welcome aboard Dennis! I hope you enjoy the videos and that they help spur some curiosity!
I have long viewed "time" as a construct that merely helps us measure change or entropy and allows us to coordinate with one anothet. Darkness is not a thing but the abscence of light, yet we know what darkness is. Nothing or zero isn't a thing, but the abscence of a specified thing. Would time not be a similar concept, in which we "know what time is" while simultaneously knowing it is not a thing unto itself?
Time is a construct of man. At least it's "measurement" is. All the numbers we use to represent time could be replaced with another set of numbers and everything would work out fine.
Being that time in some sense is an illusion, then our perception moving forward in time could be just the way our brains are wired, which this video alludes to. This is because of evolution and is important for our survival. But let’s just say that if our brains could be wired differently, we could see the past unfolding in front of us instead. I believe we can travel in time with our consciousness and when you watch the movie “the time machine” that seems to be inferring that idea. Even though the time traveler builds the time machine, i feel it’s really his mind that is doing the time travelling
No. Time does not surround us and no, time is not what moves the world. We are not immersed in time. Time is not the engine of reality. Time is what we call the change that we distinguish in reality.
Exactly.
Time is a derivative from macroscopic (not quantum) movement. If all macro movement in the universe stopped, time would make no sense.
@@jamesmdr_ I don't understand what you mean by movement in this context. We call perceived change time. Changes result from interactions between elements of reality. Some can be interpreted as changes between the relationships between those elements. Would a change in the frequency of an electromagnetic wave or in the energy level of an electron be a movement in your interpretation?
No.
Light traveling space is movement, your car running also, chemical reactions also, but an eletron spinning or change location inside an atom is not. I think movement as a macroscopic thing to imply the notion of time. What happens inside an atom, the movement of eletrons, you can think about it as a change, but if nothing happens because of it, like an emission of a photon, the notion of time does not emerge.
Time *is* the fourth dimension. Other people, mainly intellectuals or philosophers, will disagree and proffer some bullshit alternative definition but they are mistaken.
So i have a theory about time. Infinite's have a weird effect on math and messes with alot of different aspects of meth and quantum field theory. I can See time as a wave .. and the universe as a singularity sitting in the ether (ether being what ever the universe is in) inert. Time is a wave that travels through the ether Separate from the singularity which is space and Energy and matter. When a Time wave hits the singularity it becomes one with space and energy and matter .., and Space Time or our universe begins. Aspects of the wave dictates rate of time, flow of time, and the amount of time which might be quite large but limited not infinite .
Time is a tool you can put on the wall
Time is the measurement of the movement of Matter . the scale of the Range of distance .there are only units of scale to measure with correctly , Sound, Light and the Cohesion of Sound / Light .. E= S/L 5th . Light cannot exist without Sound ...fact ! your going to ask why , because light can not move thru sub particle Atomic matter without creating electron friction .
On a personal scale, I think we must define time in relation to consciousness: it's the direction within spacetime that consciousness achieves continuity. Put another way, it's the sensation of continuous self along a line of adjacent moments of self. Space is then defined orthogonally to this axis. But it must also correlate to the macroscopic distribution of matter. Considered within a static blocktime model, material objects like our galaxy or the planet Earth occupy contiguous 4d volumes that extend, spaghetti-like, in the rough direction we call time. However, there's no a priori reason to assume this direction is particularly straight, only that it defines a continuum which seemingly follows the laws of physics and as the substrate upon which local time can arise. Why a static 4d universe came to be structured with these long parallel-ish veins of matter remains a bigger, and difficult question. Not to mention how local consciousness arises. But if we can find satisfying answer to those, then the nature of time falls out for free. That's how I approach the question.
It is true that our perspective is important when considering time. If you consider space-time as a whole, there is no direction. On the other hand, consciousness is not a special case of phenomenon. It is just your subjective point of view and the conceptual model that your body builds about its environment. That has not the slightest relevance to the changes in the universe. In my opinion, Cartesian axes are a very effective tool for representing space but they completely fail when it comes to including time. They serve to consider gravity but they only go so far. The block universe hypothesis raises questions that, from that perspective, cannot be answered. The main one is: What is interpreted by "interaction" between elements of reality, in that context?
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd From a blocktime perspective, you have to approach questions of interaction and causality entirely differently. It is not at all easy to express these concepts without using terms that have concepts of time already embedded within them. I wouldn't say such questions are unanswerable, but they do require a vocabulary with all those connotations stripped out. It's quite an exercise.
@@mattp1337 In your opinion, why do two certain elements interact with specific points of their continuous extension? Why in an element, in a certain position of it?
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd I don't know. But if the result is static block of spacetime, then the best analogy is plotting some kind of 4d function. But it's not clear what the independent variables are, and it might be best not to take that analogy literally. Regardless, it's heavily constrained such that from a local macroscopic/temporal viewpoint it can still be interpreted as reasonably sensible and continuous. The non-determinism and microscopic discontinuity of modern physics gives us a little wiggle room, but not much. Appealing to additional dimensions is not ruled out, though I'm reluctant to invoke any kind of quasitime within which this whole structure can anneal into a self-consistent form. That's a turtles-all-the-way-down non-answer.
@@mattp1337 No that's not going to work. You won't be able to justify positions without adding something external to space-time. The block universe is a model that contradicts the most basic of reality. Nor does the representation of time as a fourth dimension work. The only way is for each element of the universe (which is still just a convention) to have its own fourth dimension and that invalidates its membership in the space-time model. There is no local area. Your feet do not pass temporally the same as your head. There is no such microscopic discontinuity. Macro and micro is just a conceptual framework to which reality is indifferent. I do not agree with you that inadvertent spatial dimensions affect the notion of time.
What is Time? I'm not telling!
Tim is thuba allhuvill iklas ⚪🌏
🦕
Your video is entitled "What is time?", but you have not answered your own question. You describe time as a curious concept and that sceintists don't know what it is. You mention your previous videos on time travel but it's difficult to know how you can travel through something you've not defined. So let me answer your question for you. When I'm travelling through air I know quite a lot about the air, I know about its constituents, its currents, its temperature etc. When travelling through water I know a similar level of detail. When travelling through earth I know about its density, its strata etc. If I'm to travel through time I'd like to know more about what time is. Time is often described simply as 'something' that progresses in a straight line from past to present to future; or 'something' measured by a clock. That seems a bit vague. Clocks measure movement or change, not time. A good clock is one that agrees with another clock. Your watch is good when it shows midday and the sun is directly above you. Let's consider what I use air, water, earth and time for. I breathe air, I drink water, I stand on the earth, I use time to sychronize activities, and to detect movement and change. So we can define time as an arbitrary regular count used to sychronize activities and processes. Am I the only thing to use time in this way. Obviously not, other people do the same thing, but also animals and plants use time in this way. It appears that all living organisms use time to sychronize activities and processes, even single celled organisms. See these internet articles: Keeping track of time: The fundamentals of cellular clocks - PMC (nih.gov) Circadian clock - Wikipedia So we could define time as a regular arbitrary count used by living organisms to synchronize processes and activities; and to detect movement and change. No non-living entity uses time. By this definition we can see that time is a tool which is useful to living organisms but not fundamental to the workings of the universe. Time measures movement, time does not provide change, it is a tool to measure change. We can also see that different organisms count 'time' at different rates and for differing purposes. This definition explains why time appears to move in one direction, because a count of 1,2,3 or 3,2,1 is useful but a count of 1,3,2 is useless. Time is relative to each organism, they count at different rates. Relative time, implies the future, present and the past are also relative to the organism. Location is also similarly relative, the three dimensions of space are relative to another location in space. There is no absolute starting point to measure from. Because time and space are both relative there is no absolute beginning and no absolute end, only the organism’s relative beginning and the organism’s relative end. There is only movement and change which organisms make sense of by using the tools of three dimensional space and one dimensional time aka spacetime.
Organisms do not keep track of time or changes. Organisms are dynamic phenomena. A type of organization of flowing matter that maintains that pracarious order as long as it allows entropy. From that perspective, organisms do not synchronize. The states have certain correspondence but there is no intention of synchronization. The change is themselves. Changes occur at rates that only depend on physical laws. It is not true that the rate of change is different for each organism. There may be metabolic differences but the rhythm is the same. What changes the rate of change is where the organism is and how fast it moves. Humans resort to memory to have the states prior to the present change and to be able to calculate the probability of the different possible outcomes. The relativity of time does not mean that there are different times in different places. But there is no universal time, if you count the number of changes.
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd Thank you for reviewing my comment. I definitely know of 2 organisms that use time - you and me 🙂. According to this linked article (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7594491/) there are lots of other non-human organisms that also use multiple clocks to measure what we call time. The following is extracted from this article “A second example comes from the clock that enforces a minimum duration in mammalian mitoses. This clock functions by generating a period at the onset of mitosis during which the activity of the protease Separase is toxic to cells (Hellmuth and Stemmann, 2020). “ . This describes a mammalian clock used during cell division. Cell division is described as having 6 phases -prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, and cytokinesis . (askabiologist.asu.edu/cell-division ) These phases have to be performed by the cell in a strict sequence and any phase cannot start until the previous one has been completed. If this did not happen cell division would not be successful and the organism would not survive. This particular clock ensures that the Anaphase does not complete too early. This implies that all life depends on an awareness of ‘time’ and that life could not exist without this awareness. Another example is the cicada which emerges to breed at the same time after living underground for 17 years. (www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-cicadas-appear-only-every-17-years) These clearly demonstrate that organisms synchronize processes and activities. The various clocks operate in different ways and count differently. On earth it is usually most beneficial to have the biological clocks working in synchronization with the rotation and orbit of the earth. The biological clock used by humans is approximately 10 minutes (for males) longer than the 24 hour rotation of the earth this and has to be regularly adjusted (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm ) This is why I think there is evidence that time is a tool used by living organisms and not a fundamental element of the universe.
I mean no offense, but “Time” does not exist, or not how you think it does. You need to try and understand. Every person, born on earth, feels a type of circadian rhythm. A temporal bias. It is something that feels so overwhelming, that you spend most of your adult years wondering where it went. You spend most of your good years in a constant struggle to make more “money”, that you lose the time you have on this beautiful little rock. You’ve come up with amazing mathematical equations and formulas that fall apart when Time is added. Einstein proved that time is relative, yet you insist on displaying an erudition you don’t have. The reason you all have this powerful feeling of time is to remind you not to waste it. Live, love, laugh… and keep those memories because they live for an eternity. “Eternity” being the keyword here. Many of you have conceited that the universe, quite possibly, is infinite…eternal. I can assure you it is. It did not begin at “the big bang”. You, simply, cannot get something from nothing. You existed long before you were born on this planet, you’ll exist long after you leave this beautiful little place. You know that energy cannot be created, nor can it be dissipated. Did you not think the same would apply to you? Use your time here to transfer your energy into something you’ll love forever. Enjoy the little time you have left. This place is but a stepping stone.
There are many things wrong in this video; a point and a line have no dimensions; a plane a has no dimension. Clocks have nothing to do with time nor do they have anything with the measurement of time for what does an unwound clock have to do with time or measurement of it? Time does not move or flow. If it flowed or moved we would see the movement of time or we would see the flow of time or be able to detect these displacements. Time has no direction or directions. Time travel is impossible because it would also imply space or place. You can't move in time without a place. So, if you could move in time to the before Bong Bang, where would you find yourself? Time travel is impossible because even if you could move in time then you would affect the surroundings immediately even on molecular level and you would change the outcome. The video does not post the definition of time at all. Time is static as if to say it's always Always. Time is static wheras entropy is not and entropy is not an indication of time. Spacetime is an erroneous way of describing the ''present''. Static time is actually not a full member of space. ''Always'' can exist with no space or a conscious observer. All mathematical expressions denoting time as ''t'' are not true representations of what the equations convey because we have no definition of time.
I agree time is impossible to define well. Putting things into words somehow always limits every concept to a spacetime framework, which makes hard to discuss existence outside of this realm. Time seems simple until one tries to think about it. How else would we calibrate or describe change?
@@BettyPipetti We already have an expression and physical law that describes change. It is entropy. But entropy does describe the ''volume'' of time but volume of change. And this change is different for different situations. And entropy cannot be a measure of time because the ubiquitous ''Always'' does not effect entropy which may make a situation of slow or fast reaction. Because time is outside of discussion realm does not mean we cannot discuss it untli we find the definition of it.
Time doesn't exist it's a man made idea
How did man make the idea tho if there was no time to make the idea.
@@SuperYtc1 There is entropy and information. Call it what you like.
There is no such thing as time. Time is a delusion. The first step to theory of everything id denying time. The second is to deny zero and infinity. The third step is to deny the rest of the numbers except prime numbers. "One" is the first of prime numbers.
OK. I’ll take the bait. Why prime numbers?