The Transparent Veil of Time

Time is one of the dimensions we breathe in, see in, and all around live in. Yet how much do we about time or think we know about it. Does time even exists in the “real” world or is it that it is an subjective projections of our minds that we mistake for reality. Let us take an introspective look at what time really is. Time being defined as “A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future”. So basically time is a linear progression from one event to the other. But in relations to space-time in general relativity its not linear like how we perceive it to be. According to relativity an observer cam see a particular object in motion move at different speeds and possibly in different directions depending on his location. For instance this famous example of people playing ping pong on a train;

“Two people riding on a train from New York to San Francisco play a game of ping-pong in the sport compartment of the train. Lets say, the train moves at 100 km per hour (= 27.8 m/s) and the two players hit the ball at a speed of two meters per second. In the reference frame of the players, the ball moves back and forth at this particular speed. For a stationary observer standing beside the railroad, however, things look quite different. In his reference frame the ball moves at 29.8 m/s when it is played forward in the direction where the train is heading, while it moves at 25.8 m/s in the same direction when it is played backwards. Thus he doesn't see the ball moving backward at all, but always moving towards San Francisco. For an observer in outer space, things look again totally different because of the Earth's rotation, which is opposite to the train's movement; therefore the outer space observer always sees the ball moving East”. So you see in based on this example, time is not absolute but relative to the observer.

But let’s examine time in a bit more detail. We use time all the time in our daily affairs and activities. We use it to measure the years, mouths, days and hourly succession of are lives from one minute to the next. Time is so important in organizing our lives and society that with out it we wouldn’t have the orderly modern day society we have today. We use it so much that ironically we take it for grated and never take a closer look at what it really is. So far we know we use time to organize our days and lives but we use it also in the conduct of advanced experiments and use it in mathematical equations. It is imperative that time be considered as one of the variables as it lends it self to the progression from one event to the next.
One of the problems of time is trying to definitively define it, we already know the definition of what it says it is in the dictionary but with this definition it still seems too intangible and abstract for my taste.
I mean what if this time is nothing but a construct of our minds. Douglas Adams once said, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so”. I’m not the first to say this or even think this. Physicists and philosophers have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all.

To go farther some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artifact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physics without invoking time, which could help pave a path to a time-free "theory of everything". If correct, the approach suggests that time really is an illusion, and that we may need to rethink how the universe at large works. Even for Einstein, time is a useful measure of things, but nothing special. But in quantum mechanics time plays a key role, keeping track of the ever-changing probabilities that define the microworld, which are encoded in the "wave function" of a quantum system. The clock by which the wave function evolves records not just the time in one particular frame of reference, but the absolute time that Einstein worked so hard to topple. So while relativity treats space and time as a whole, quantum mechanics splits the universe into two parts: the quantum system being observed and the classical world outside. In this fractured universe, a clock always remains outside the quantum system All the same, physicists are loath to throw out quantum theory, as it has proven capable of extraordinarily accurate predictions. What they need is a way to do quantum mechanics in the absence of time.

Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Marseille in France, has found just that. In the past year, he and his colleagues have worked out a method to compress multiple quantum events in time into a single event that can be described without reference to time The idea is this: suppose we have an electron characterized by its spin, a quantum property that is either "up" or "down" along whatever direction you measure it. Say we want to make two consecutive measurements of its spin, one in the x direction and one in the y direction. The probabilities of the possible outcomes will depend on the order in which we perform the measurements. That's because a measurement "collapses" the indeterminate state of the wave function, forcing it to commit to a given state; the first measurement will change the particle's state, which affects the second measurement. Say we already know the electron's spin is up in the x direction. If we now measure the spin in the x direction followed by the y direction, we will find the x spin up - no change there - and then there is a 50:50 chance of finding the y spin up or down. But if we begin by measuring the y spin, that disturbs the spin in the x direction, creating a 50-50 probability for both measurements.

If reordering the measurements in time changes the probabilities, how can we calculate the probabilities of sequences of events without reference to time? The trick, says Rovelli, is to adjust the boundary between the quantum system under observation and the classical outside world where measuring devices are considered to reside. By shifting the boundary, we can include the measuring device as part of the quantum system. In that case we no longer ask, "What is the probability of the electron having spin up and then spin down?" Instead we ask, "What is the probability of finding the measuring devices in a particular state?" The measuring device no longer collapses the wave function; rather, the electron and the measuring device together are described by a single wave function, and a single measurement of the entire set-up causes the collapse.

You see even with time being such a useful instrument it can be replaced and theories might even possibly function without it. My take on time is that it is an illusion created by our minds and projected onto reality. Why this is, is because we are aware of our selves and our environment at all times. This self-awareness is so constant that it gives the illusion of time and events happening from one moment to the next. For example imagine a video camera, it captures moments of our lives and allows us to revisit these moments at a latter time. But you see the video camera is not capturing time or the actual event happening, but capturing one moment at a time in a single picture. It takes so many of these pictures in such a fast succession that it appears that the moment is actually happening when it really is not. Our minds work this way also in that it takes in all this information from the external world at such a constant pace that are minds fool us into thinking that time really exists. I mean when you sleep time seems to fly by, that’s because you our not fully aware of your environment when you are sleeping and so it feels like five minutes and not 5 hours. Basically How I view it is that there is only this moment. To put it in more detail there is a constant state of motion in which matter and energy and the reactions of such by the laws of cause and effect happen is in such a linear fashion that time appears to be present but is not in the slightest notion really needed. Don’t get me wrong time is a really useful tool in the measurement of things, but that’s all it is, a tool.

I mean its not like time is actually needed for thing to react and happen. Like for instance when you light a piece of paper on fire it doesn’t ask it’s self-the question “oh it must be the time to start chemically reacting with each other”. That would be absurd just like with radioactive decay. It does decay in a predictable fashion, as it will take the same amount of time no matter if we designate time as fundamental or an illusion. Each atom decays randomly and yet as a conglomerate of nuclei, they all somehow "know" the decay rate. But this doesn’t mean that they have collective "knowledge" or awareness of time. The observed decay rate of a lump of the material is therefore an averaging effect that we are seeing.

One question you might ask is what exactly is an illusion to begin with. Well the definition in the dictionary is that it is "an apparent state of reality, the perception of which is generated by our senses operating in what would conventionally be regarded as normal" or “ An erroneous perception of reality” So when I say that time is illusion I saying that time is a erroneous perception of reality. What is “reality”? Well it’s defined as “something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily” So something that objectively exists separate from our perception of it. But how can we know what is objective and what is subjective? Well I’m not getting to that in this article, to say the least we can never really know what is and what isn’t real. So one could ask “but if time is an illusion couldn’t everything be an illusion?” My answer is yes, everything could be an illusion, I personally don’t think everything is an illusion but it possibly could be. The reason I think this is, is that we as conscious beings are made up of our genetics/ tools that we perceive with and interpret with and our environment. If everything we perceived were subjective and created by our minds then at birth we wouldn’t need to learn things when were babies as these things would be preprogrammed into us. But it turns out that we do need external stimuli/ information to develop our concepts of the world before we can create our own interpretations of the concepts that we have previously developed. We do though contain in our minds from birth preprogrammed ways of interpreting stimuli like for instance depth perception and motion perception. So yes in a way from birth we already view the world in a way that in essence is distorted and formed by our mind in such a way as to be practically useful for survival but not objectively useful in finding truth if there is any to begin with. This all boils down to all information being received is filtered in a way as to make all knowledge subjective but the strong probability that there is a objective reality outside our mind.

When it comes down to it, taking time out of our equations and out of our minds have profound effects. It for one squashes the paradoxes that might accompany time like for instance time travel or to be more specific the grandfather paradox. The paradox is this: suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveler's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveler's parents (and by extension the traveler himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have traveled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveler would have been conceived allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox. But you see when time is taken away from the equation such a paradox disappears. If time does not exist then creating a machine to take you back in it would be impossible.

I know it might be hard to imagine a world without time or maybe you can. But though I might be wrong I think it is necessary for everyone to be open-minded and to be skeptical of the things that we take for granted. In the end that’s all I can really ask of anyone.