Chris Alih 5 months ago

@Azmoth 4 min read Write a comment #short-stories

What Is Time?!

It seems one can't really make sense of time without talking about the laws of thermodynamics (energy exchange between particles and their environment). To us, time is made manifest in observed changes.

But here's the thing, our perception of time on a macro-level is mostly determined by human activities, not necessarily thermodynamics, which is the case. We measure time (progression) by comparing activities against others. This is why some feel behind in life because their mates have acquired more, built more, and made more; their having more is used to judge how time has passed, using the shared age as a template for judgment.

Our sense of time is tied to activities that happened on particular dates compared to other activities; memory. Here is the interesting bit...Let's say we have no dates, calendar, no way to measure time... My favorite example; imagine being locked in an 'all-white room' with no clocks and no means of interacting with the outside world. Would you experience the passage of time? 

Probably not; there's nothing for comparison to quantify the flow. You'll eventually go mad. Everything in the room is the same, bland, and consistent. Imagine you're also an immortal locked in this room; you can be there for thousands of years without even knowing it. Even if you're given a Time Machine, you won't notice any significant change when you travel back in time. 

There's no variation; it's all the same. So, how can you tell if you've traveled to the past or future? There's a reason I used the age. A normal human would notice the flow of time through aging. He'd see wrinkles and notice failing organs. In this regard, we can say time is the directional flow of entropy.

That means, without human activities, the flow of time is made manifest in how your body interacts with the environment. It breaks down, rebuilds, feeds, and gets old. But the immortal dude doesn't experience this entropy within himself. How would he quantify the flow of time?! There's a reason I used the age. A normal human would notice the flow of time through aging. He'd see wrinkles and notice failing organs. In this regard, we can say time is the directional flow of entropy.

We can say the universe has a past because we can sort of rewind to a particular point that isn't now but consists of processes and events that made 'now' possible. Particles decay (it's measured in time); it takes time for light to travel certain distances even though a photon doesn't experience time itself. Here's another thing that bothers me...Space could be a distance of A - B. It might take a certain number of minutes to get from A to B. We can say it takes time to cover this distance. But what about the time itself...?

See it this way. It'll take me 8 minutes to get to the sun at the speed of light cos of distance. But if I decide to sit in one position for 24 hours. How do I quantify traveling to various points within 24 hours since I'm not covering any distance? I'm only moving through time, not spacetime. Can I travel back to 0.3 secs of today, or is it only substantial when it's in decades?! The third law of thermodynamics states that a temperature of absolute zero (0 K) is impossible.

Heat is a form of energy caused by the interaction of particles. Temperature is a measurement of this energy. So, absolute 0 means the particles aren't moving at all. That is, no entropy. If time is the directional flow of entropy, can it be said that time stops at absolute zero, which is impossible? Or there's more going on here?