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Did we create Time?

Wake said:
This thought bothered me last night; couldn't sleep. We humans "created" many things, from morals and gods to "good" and "evil." We create man-made hypothetical constructs.

Does this include time? Does time by itself exist, or did we just create the concept, like we created the days, the months, and the years? It seems to me we created time, because we watched the way celestial bodies and planets moved, so we made a slipshod sort of spreadsheet, time, to correlate with the movements. What would happen if all planets and spacial bodies stopped... moving? How would we create days and months? I'm thinking there is no "time." There just "is," and us within it, we slowly succumb to entropy, illness, etc.

If time never existed, does that mean all of existence never had a beginning, or did it always exist?
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Why are you asking us when you could have Morgan Freeman tell you?
 
wolfman24 said:
Animal migration is not TIME dependant. There are many variables that affect when and how they migrate. they have no sense of time at all. foot candles, geo magnetic forces, barometric pressure among others are the proper variables not time.
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Perhaps some animals have a sense of time, since both chimpanzees and dolphins are more intelligent than the mentally disabled, and some mentally disabled certainly have a sense of time.
 
Wake said:
Does this include time?
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Yes and no.

The term "time" is a human intellectual invention. Its purpose, as all language's purpose is, is to help humans comprehend the universe.

What time actually is, we have no idea yet. We know it's an intrinsic quality of the universe, but we don't know its basic qualities and its basic nature.

Yet.
 
The idea of time was created by human, but by the way we perceive it, time always existed or it was created before human life. So yes and no, the concept by which we perceive it means that it always existed and therefor not created by man, but this concept was created by humans and therefor can be considered irrelevant seeing how it is a concept.
 
Wake said:
Does this include time?
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I suggest watching this NOVA episode by the acclaimed physicist Brian Greene:
The Illusion of Time

Time is a perceived quality of the universe by our human intelligence. The rest of the things you mentioned, like good, evil, etc, are not relevant when discussing universal truths, or as I like to call them, cosmological realities.
 
Rainman05 said:
As far as we know, we are the first species to record time. There was never another sentient being on this planet, or with whom we made contact, that records time.

Time exists with or without us.

Earth is 4.5 bil years old. We, humanity as we know it, homo sapiens sapiens, are only around for 30k years. We use different ways of recording time. In days, seconds, hours, etc. The concept of hours and minutes hasn't been around forever since the dawn of time. It was invented, like many other things. It has proven to be a good way of recording things so we did it.
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Then why do birds migrate before the weather even changed? And the method of keeping time is a way to measure the temporal dimension of time.
 
FreedomFromAll said:
Then why do birds migrate before the weather even changed? And the method of keeping time is a way to measure the temporal dimension of time.
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They're just imba.
 
Wake said:
This thought bothered me last night; couldn't sleep. We humans "created" many things, from morals and gods to "good" and "evil." We create man-made hypothetical constructs.

Does this include time? Does time by itself exist, or did we just create the concept, like we created the days, the months, and the years? It seems to me we created time, because we watched the way celestial bodies and planets moved, so we made a slipshod sort of spreadsheet, time, to correlate with the movements. What would happen if all planets and spacial bodies stopped... moving? How would we create days and months? I'm thinking there is no "time." There just "is," and us within it, we slowly succumb to entropy, illness, etc.

If time never existed, does that mean all of existence never had a beginning, or did it always exist?
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If there is no time, how do you do anything slowly?
 
The topic reminded me of this old joke....


A man, trying very hard to understand the nature of God, asks Him, "God, how long is a million years to you?"

God replies, "A million years is like a minute."

The man then asks, "God, how much is a million dollars to you?"

God replies, "A million dollars is like a penny."

After thinking for a moment, the man asks, "God, could you give me a penny?"

God replies, "In a minute!"


LOL Time can only move forward but the memory can only move backwards.
 
FreedomFromAll said:
Then why do birds migrate before the weather even changed? And the method of keeping time is a way to measure the temporal dimension of time.
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Because they feel the weather getting colder. They fly south in fall when the temperatures have measurably dropped since the summer. It's not because they were carrying calendars.
 
KevinKohler said:
It drives me crazier to try to think about nothingness. I'm one of those non religious folks who thinks THAT is what awaits me when I die...nothingness. It's hard to think about a concept of non conception, lol.
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You seem to be lost existentially speaking. These are signs you should go out and seek meaning in life.
 
When a hypothetical space ship enters at just the right speed into an orbit around a black hole 15 million miles in diameter, the people inside the spaceship will experinence the time continum slowing down to half of what the space ships complete orbit is observed from earth. So for every 16 miles the spaceship travels in a complete orbit observed from earth, the space ship is only traveling 8 miles near the surface around the black hole. Therefore, as the theory goes, the closer one gets to mass gravitional pull, the slower time gets, and the farther away one gets from mass gravitional pull, the faster time goes...hence the expanding universe. Which kinda makes the notion of time travel theoretically possible. But since time only moves forward, then it stands to reason that one could only travel into the future and not the past.



Science seems to have a much better understanding of time than it does gravity. Gravity is the flaw in Einstein's general theory of relativity because he could only explain gravity down to the singularity of the big bang(s) but he couldn't explain what happened during or before the singularity or where gravity comes from. Some have theorized that it comes from another dimension.
 
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KevinKohler said:
So, now, the real brain ****...time HAD to exist in order for the big bang to happen. Time, it could be said, is the ultimate catalyst for any and all chemical reactions, of which, the big bang was a major one.


So what started time?
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We are currently investigating quantum mechanics with that, but would not be shamed to say "we do not know."

The religious have a lot better and easier answer. Just like anything else, it's "God that made it" or didn't you heard of it?
 
RabidAlpaca said:
Because they feel the weather getting colder. They fly south in fall when the temperatures have measurably dropped since the summer. It's not because they were carrying calendars.
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That may be true for some birds but not for all. Most birds noticed that the days are getting shorter and that the weather is starting to change which sets off hormones that compel them to fly a certain direction. Its a bit more than noticing time and season changes. While I will admit that observation of time isnt the entire reason for migrating, time is a factor.


But if birds and animals dont meet anyones standards for observing time: The Beginning of Time - Stephen Hawking

"The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again. However, the contracting phase, will not have the opposite arrow of time, to the expanding phase. So we will keep on getting older, and we won't return to our youth. Because time is not going to go backwards, I think I better stop now."
 
FreedomFromAll said:
That may be true for some birds but not for all. Most birds noticed that the days are getting shorter and that the weather is starting to change which sets off hormones that compel them to fly a certain direction. Its a bit more than noticing time and season changes. While I will admit that observation of time isnt the entire reason for migrating, time is a factor.


But if birds and animals dont meet anyones standards for observing time: The Beginning of Time - Stephen Hawking

"The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again. However, the contracting phase, will not have the opposite arrow of time, to the expanding phase. So we will keep on getting older, and we won't return to our youth. Because time is not going to go backwards, I think I better stop now."
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I'm very familiar with A Brief History of Time. Ive read it in 2 languages (English and German). I don't understand how that has to do with bird migration or my initial statement that we absolutely did mot create time.
 
RabidAlpaca said:
I'm very familiar with A Brief History of Time. Ive read it in 2 languages (English and German). I don't understand how that has to do with bird migration or my initial statement that we absolutely did mot create time.
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Well because this is not a conversation about bird behavior. Instead we are talking about the temporal dimension of time. Even though I brought up bird migration I dont feel that we need to keep going on about it since I admit it was a poor avenue for me to go on. But the lecture that I linked shows that today the concept of time is a non-issue. Its is silly to assume that time is a human construct.

I thought that you would have realized what we were talking about in this thread and not get stuck on birds. BTW what is the point of reading Hawkings in German? Am I supposed to be awed by you reading a German translation of something that was not originally written in German?
 
FreedomFromAll said:
Well because this is not a conversation about bird behavior. Instead we are talking about the temporal dimension of time. Even though I brought up bird migration I dont feel that we need to keep going on about it since I admit it was a poor avenue for me to go on. But the lecture that I linked shows that today the concept of time is a non-issue. Its is silly to assume that time is a human construct.

I thought that you would have realized what we were talking about in this thread and not get stuck on birds. BTW what is the point of reading Hawkings in German? Am I supposed to be awed by you reading a German translation of something that was not originally written in German?
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Nope, it was just to emphasize my familiarity with the book. If you don't think we invented time then we have nothing to debate.
 
Wiseone said:
If there is no time, how do you do anything slowly?
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That's a good question, and I'll try to answer it. If time does not exist, it must be true that everything is in a state of constant existence, but that everything eventually wears down.

What we call time is a system of measurement to record "lengths" within existence. Everything that makes up our system of time is based on the rotation of the planets around the sun. What do you think would happen to Earth's sense and schedule of time if its rotation around the sun was approximately doubled? Would every one of our measurements be doubled? What human first created the concept of "minute," and decided that it must contain 60 "seconds"? Who created the months, and gave them names? If memory serves, Napoleon Bonaparte sought to rename the months and maybe even the days. What we call time is really constant existence and movement; we can't sense it through empirical means, but we see things deteriorate and grow. So we gave it a name, and then we went about the task of trying to place a system around it to give us a better grasp on it.

I could try to go further, but explaining it would be a headache and a half. :mrgreen:
 
Wake said:
That's a good question, and I'll try to answer it. If time does not exist, it must be true that everything is in a state of constant existence, but that everything eventually wears down.

What we call time is a system of measurement to record "lengths" within existence. Everything that makes up our system of time is based on the rotation of the planets around the sun. What do you think would happen to Earth's sense and schedule of time if its rotation around the sun was approximately doubled? Would every one of our measurements be doubled? What human first created the concept of "minute," and decided that it must contain 60 "seconds"? Who created the months, and gave them names? If memory serves, Napoleon Bonaparte sought to rename the months and maybe even the days. What we call time is really constant existence and movement; we can't sense it through empirical means, but we see things deteriorate and grow. So we gave it a name, and then we went about the task of trying to place a system around it to give us a better grasp on it.

I could try to go further, but explaining it would be a headache and a half. :mrgreen:
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The constant state theory was debunked decades a go with the discovery of a expanding universe, big bang etc. In fact it turned into the Quasi-steady state which is different. But both seem to lack any real rebuttal of the big bang theory.


But at any rate the name of the units or even the size of the units that we use to describe the passage of time is irrelevant. Fossils the age of rocks and minerals show that time is a fact not a human construct or just a concept. Come on this is really a non issue thread made by some asshat. bawhahaha!
 
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