The Illusion of Time

A quick one, and a bit of an unusual one for this blog. Time - is it an illusion?

Personally, it's my view that 'time' isn't real in a scientific sense. I believe it only really exists conceptually. (This topic popped up on Twitter, thanks to Elon Musk, so that's why I'm now posting about it here.)

Time is just general movement (all the things that are generally happening), measured against a regular, repeating movement.

People have this idea that time is a thing that exists, that we're all moving through, but I don't think that's the case. There's just movement, and the concept of time arises from things moving. Things don't move in, or through time. Time springs out as a concept from the movement. So essentially there is no time, just things moving.

You could say there is no time, only change. Things change (move), and time is just a name for change when it's measured against something that changes predictably or uniformly.

Example

Often we'll have time represented, as a real thing, in an equation. For example, if we were measuring how fast a car was travelling we'd use the equation:

Speed = Distance/Time

Where we measure the distance travelled in a given time by the car to get the speed.

However, though it's handy to think in terms of time, the reality is we're not measuring the distance relative to time - we're measuring it relative to a clock.

Let's say it's a watch with a ticking second hand, and the car travels 600 meters in 60 seconds.

The ticking second hand is moving.

So though we think in terms of time ..and measure the speed as 600/60 (distance/time), giving us 10 meters per second. The reality is we're actually measuring the movement of the car, against the movement of the second hand.

We're saying: As the second hand moved sixty times the car moved 600 meters.

..But!

Now you might be saying "..But the second hand is measuring a second of time with each tick!"

However, what is a second?

It's a division of a minute, which is a division of an hour, which is a division of a day.

And what is a day?

It's the Earth moving around the Sun.

So the original clock - the heavenly motion of the Sun - is again just a repeating movement. We're measuring the things on Earth against the regular, repeating motion of the Sun.

If you travel 100 miles in 5 days you might think in terms of time, but again, in reality, it's a case that as the Sun travelled around 5 times you travelled 100 miles. It's movement measured against movement. Not against some imagined corridor of time we're all travelling through.

And all clocks are the same. They all provide a regular motion against which we can measure all other motion. Whether it's the ticking hand of a watch, the Sun or Moon, or an atomic clock.

So ultimately we're always measuring things relative to movement.