What is time exactly? I mean, does it really exist? Or is it just an illusion created by our perception of how we measure the happenings for our daily lives?
You see, everything supposedly moves through time. as I am typing this, it's taking time. When I am done typing this post, I will be however much firther a head in time than I am now. But how significant is that really? We base everything around the most simple measure for time there is; the day-night cycle. For the earth to rotate on its axis a complete 360 degrees is how we get out day. from there we divide it into 24 equal hours, then into 60 equal minute, 60 equal seconds and so on. And thus we have our measure of time. But you see, we could take anything, any measure of distance from one instant to the next to base this measure off - say, a heartbeat - and use that to measure how long something takes. And yes, I'm aware that this doesn't change how long one lives, or how long your poptarts take to cook, but thats because our brains can only process information at a certain speed.
This is where it gets tricky.
We see things happen at roughly 30 frames per second, and that's as much as our brains can take in from our eyes. But a fly on the other hand processes things much faster, and hence has a much faster reaction time (why they are so damn hard to hit). A fly would see us moving quite slowly, almost as if we slowed down time and watched the world go by in slo-motion. Here's where the perception part comes in. If I am in a state of sped up time, where the world is moving at half my speed, am I moving faster, or is the world moving slower? To me, I would perceive my own actions as I normally do, but everything else would seem slower. To everyone else, things would be moving as normal, but I would be abnormally speedy. So which is reality?
We measure how long something takes to happen by our arbitrary base of a second. This exists in all of our clocks, watches, phones or whathaveyou. but not everything 'happens' in seconds. monsterous amounts of events can occur within a miniscule portion of a second, yet if we capture such events on say a high speed camera we can view these things happening over a longer period of time to be able to see all that's going on. So what if our brains could process things at that speed? Would a lightning flash take a whole minute rather than a fraction of a second?
The notion of 'time travel' is another perplexing matter. For now, let's think of time as a straight line. Our lives exist on this line. at one point or another, we decide to travel back to the 60s (because hippy life is the shiz) and live there for the remainder of our lives. Does that line that is our life become skewed so that the end is pushed behind the start? Or does our line continue on straight but we are experiencing a time befor us? See, from the perspective of the 'time traveller', the time line would look something like this:
Born(1990)---2000---2010---1960---1970---and so on
However, the rest of the world would experience their own time line, in the normal order, there'd just be this random person who appears 30 years before he is born. You would be travelling back to a time that has already passed, yet still be experiencing the present time in yourself. you would still be experiencing your 20th year of life, only 30 years before you were born.
People, animals, organisms, minerals... everything seems to move through some sort of dimension and grows and decays... but is time really what we are moving through, or is it merely a measure we has invented because we simply cannot perceive it any other way?
Here's a brainfuck for you: Try thinking of a time before time - and existence before the beggining; after the end.
We can only seem to comprehend things with a definite beggining and a definite end.
I really should get to sleep. It's getting late... or is it? :P
Signing out,
~Nattoons
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"Life is the whole point of the universe. Anyone who says different is either a robot or a hypocrite."
Luke McKinney - The 7 Most Mind-Blowing Places Science Has Discovered Life
