About Time

Apparently it's about time I got a blog, so here it is. I probably won't add much to it as I generally think there's already enough crap online. It's worse than free to air television and that's pretty bad.

Speaking of time I saw an ad today (don't I everyday?) for Newscientist magazine's latest issue due on the newstands tomorrow. It contains an article discussing that time may be an illusion. This got me thinking and more often these days I turn to the 'Net to see what's out there on the topic. I found this interesting blog entry and felt the need to comment. Which in turn led me to start this blog dammit.

After some thought/meditation on this, my thoughts are that time probably isn't an illusion per se, but certainly something weird is going on. I suspect that past/present/future possibly do exist all at once but only if viewed from another dimension (meaning?), or perhaps "outside of" our universe - if there is such a place (for another discussion).

My interest in all this was sparked today by my reading of The Invisible Century by Richard Panek (a Christmas gift). Not a bad read if your into science history with some coincidences thrown in for good measure.

I've often thought about time. It can be considered in some ways our enemy, but it can also be on our side. I remember my physics teacher at High School saying on the subject "time is because things happen". He was referring to physical events of course. I immediately thought - if *all* motion in the universe stopped, would time cease to exist?! According to the blog I referred to earlier space-time exists only because both space and time exist so if everything stopped moving would space-time (i.e our universe) cease to exist? If that's the case then our universe depend on motion for its very existence. Yet for motion to exist there has to be space and time because motion is distance (space) travelled over time (i.e v=d/t). Hmm this is awfully circular. If time is illusory then it follows that motion is also, and so is the space-time that underpins our universe! Hmmm