What is time? We spend a good deal of our lives worried about the minutes, seconds, moments, hours, days, weeks and years that we use to segment our existence. Even when you are not concerned with it, you are on an internal schedule. How long has it been since you last ate? Will the sun continue lighting your part of the world while you finish your project?

Bells, buzzers and whistles tell us when things are to begin and end. Our days begin at the line marked in some imaginary part of space that we call time. From there, you try to reach the end of the race before crossing the finish line for the day. There are never enough hours in a day. And, you would still find yourself thinking that if God had placed a thousand hours in each day.

But, what is time itself? Time is a road that we take from yesterday to tomorrow. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. Time is a boundary in our consciousness that orders the actions in the universe in a regular way. None of this tells you much of anything.

What if space is like a field? I do not mean to say that space is a common field, just that it is something immaterial that saturates a given volume. Could time be a measure of movement within the field of space? Like dropping a colored die into a glass of water, space is disturbed by matter and tries to distribute it evenly by diffusion. Is this something like the nature of time?

Time flows from order toward chaos. Entropy increases; however, this could be an effect that happens within time instead of a mechanism of time. In the past, I’ve used entropy as a measure of time. This could be like measuring the time with a clock and thinking of the clock as the source of time rather than an instrument for its measure. It is not uncommon in philosophical physics for people to assume that an effect of a phenomenon is actually its cause. I have seen gravity referred to as a tilt in space which would only result in movement if there is gravity to pull you across the tilted surface.

The easiest way to think of time is as in terms of a dimension. All of the universe is moving along a road, at a steady speed. This road is a dimension. Time would be our movement along this dimension and a measure of the distance along this dimension but not the dimension itself. It works best if you use a define a dimension as a coordinate that you would need to uniquely locate any single object in space. When the object is there is an important measurement.

Have I answered the question yet? As with all knowledge, your understanding will be bounded by your frame of reference. What are the core beliefs that underlie your science? From this foundation, you derive the standards of evidence and the measure of proof that will solidify your understanding and determine what answer you will be willing to accept. This is the perfect question for stand up philosophers like me, but I have used up all my time and space to explore this question.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.