PLEASE READ THIS TO INFORM YOURSELF!
I believe the universe never "came into existence". It simply has been, and always will be.... infinitely... in all directions. Time is a concept man created based on our rotation.
Imagine a bag full of grasshoppers: open the bag, and in no time the little critters are everywhere, heading in every direction. Reversing the process, getting them back into the bag, would be nigh on impossible. It certainly wouldn’t happen by chance.
Every physical or chemical reaction, including those in biological processes, involves energy transfers in which some of that energy gets away. The nuclear reactions in stars are driven by the release of energy, the energy that comes to us as heat and light from the sun. Scientists call this increasing entropy, also The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
That lost energy scatters in every direction, making the reverse process about as likely as all those grasshoppers obligingly stepping back into that bag. [Reversing one of those reactions requires more energy, so there’s always a net energy loss.] The one-way street of time is the route taken by those grasshoppers and that energy alike: out, never back in; scattering, never regrouping.
Numerous studies point to particles of matter being light wrapped round in closed loops. The book Tapestry of Light shows how this precisely fits a whole spread of proven scientific facts. Here, too, some of that steadily circulating energy can be released ‘into the wild’ by one-way reactions – such as two atoms joining to form a molecule, releasing some of the electron energy from each of those atoms.
So there we have the flow of time. It’s actually those energy flows, scattering randomly from events that thus can’t run in reverse (since they’d need a random focused input of energy – a contradiction) or circulating round to form material particles. The rate of those energy flows – the speed of light – defines the rate of time.
Or does it? Let’s take a closer look.
And that’s what gives us our measure of time, whether it’s an atomic clock or marks on a burning candle – or even the synapses in your brain or mine, giving us an estimate of time. The faster rate of external events would be precisely balanced by the faster rate of every measure of time that you can imagine, including our own perception. If something happens twice as fast, and your clock runs twice as fast, you won’t notice the difference.
Those energy flows* could speed up by a hundred, a thousand, a million times – or, conversely, slow down by any of those factors – and it would make no detectable difference whatever to the universe. Our experience, and the way of being of everything around us, would be absolutely unchanged.
[* Yes, we’re talking about the speed of light here.]
This is because what we refer to as ‘timing’ a process or event is actually a comparison of two distances travelled by energy flows: around the process/event and around the ‘timing’ device, whatever that may be. That comparison doesn’t change, whatever the speed of those energy flows.
In short: any externally imposed ‘rate of time’ would be 100% irrelevant to the workings of the material universe. So inclusion of that concept in our world view is a red herring, it simply gets in the way of an objective analysis of material reality. Time, in that sense, does not exist.
[This reasoning, of course, applies equally to the ‘proper time’ of objects in different frames of reference, for those concerned with relativity theory.]
You might be thinking if you've read this far, "But … but … but there is time. We experience it every day, every minute, every second".
Yes. We experience sequencing of events – but we also experience sequencing of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and the sequencing of notes on the piano. Neither of them involves time. We also have the sensation of duration: we can even check that sensation against a clock – but that’s just comparing the distance travelled by energy flows around the circuits in our brain with distance around energy-flow circuits in our clock. Two distances again.
So – dammit, what is the thing we experience as time?
It’s the mind rationalising a rather greater (though actually very simple) cosmic principle – just as the mind rationalises some electromagnetic frequencies as colours. That’ll have to wait for another time – pun intended
Thanks for reading!!!
