How Do We Know That Time Exists?

How Do We Know That Time Exists?
How do we know that time exists? - Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The alarm goes off early in the morning. You take the train to go to work in the morning. You stop for lunch. You take the train home in the evening. You participate in a one-hour run. You are meeting for dinner. Then you sleep. You always repeat these things in different ways. You remember your dead relatives and celebrate their birthdays. At the level of states, when we consider the measure of time, Empires develop, collapse, and new nations are created. The passage of time affects every aspect of human existence.

However, we cannot see or touch it. So how do we know it's really there?
Kazuya Koyama, Professor of Cosmology, said: "In physics, we have what we call 'absolute time' and it is used to represent various changes as a series of events. “We explain how things move using Newtonian physics, and time is a very important component for that.”

Even now, a close estimate of how people experience time in their daily lives is provided by the traditional Newtonian view of time, which holds that time is continuous throughout the cosmos. Wherever we are in the world, whether it's London, Tokyo or Buenos Aires, we all perceive time and synchronize our clocks in the same way.

No Space, No Time

But physicists have discovered that time is not always consistent and can exhibit a variety of behaviors. When we talk about time, we also need to consider space as they are related. We cannot separate the two, and an object's experience of time depends on how it moves through space.

In essence, what you experience depends on your speed in space as an observer, according to Einstein's special relativity, which describes how velocity affects mass, time, and space.
Additionally, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the gravity of a large object can act on the passage of time.

This has been proven by numerous experiments. Scientists have even found that the strong gravitational fields of black holes cause the space-time around them to bend. Koyama continues to challenge this theory.

“A good, solid example to ponder all of this is to look at how we use GPS,” Koyama said.

“A constellation of Earth-orbiting satellites makes GPS possible.

These constellations are located at a very high altitude. This causes them to feel the gravity weaker. Therefore, one might think that time should pass faster than for us on Earth because of the greater gravity there.

However, since satellites orbit the earth extremely quickly, this is actually trying to slow down time and compensate for the absence of gravity.”

Understanding how these two influences interact and affect each other is essential for the worldwide GPS network to function properly.

And an important component of this is a coherent theory of time that explains how objects move. Clocks don't lie to us because time is real outside of our experience.

Could time travel ever be possible?

Koyama, Professor of Cosmology at the University of Portsmouth and therefore trying to inform us about the truth, had to be asked about the possibility of time travel in the future.

When Koyama was asked a question, he replied:

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but to be able to travel through time, Koyama explains, "we'll have to find an entirely new kind of matter that has the capacity to alter the curvature of time and space."

“Such a substance would need properties that are simply unobtainable in nature. "While physicists certainly think that going back in time is unthinkable, it's fun to daydream about."

Source: phys.org/

📩 25/08/2022 22:22

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