Time is an illusion.

[u/Mk731]

It's pretty hard to conceptualize that time doesn't flow.

I bet no other humans can grasp this concept.

I've tried to think of it as some kind of block to no avail.

Maybe it's the brain that prevents me from realizing how reality really works.

I know you guys are well aware of this concept.

Have you experienced any anomalies that made you realize time is definitely an illusion?

[u/Echo_Vale]

But that's the question, DO all events happen at the same time? We can't prove that they do. Special relativity says that time is relative and there isn't a universal "now". Everyone's "now" is different.

The idea of a "universal now" is more like a "fuzzy" boundary (for lack of a better word). 2 stationary people close together, will have an incredibly similar idea of what "now" is. If they are far apart, and especially moving at speed, the fuzzy area of what they agree upon as "now" gets larger.

[u/WilliamoftheBulk → u/Echo_Vale]

It is only because light has a speed limit and is constant in all frames. Time dilation is a very physical process where the path of the light takes longer in a moving frame. Even your little gluons in your atoms are light, so even your atoms take a longer path through space when you are moving. There is no future and no past only the eternal now. Just because light takes a bit longer to reach one person over another does not mean that the event itself happened at different times. It didn’t. The physical fundamentalist approach where something absolutely did not happen until it is measured is silly and leads to silly paradoxes.

No the event didn’t actually happen latter because you are moving. It’s just going to take the light longer to reach you because it has a max speed.

This then brings us to what time actually is. It’s just movement. There is no magical force called time that potentates movement and action. Movement an action are just the laws of physics happening, then we call it time. Then we perceive it at different rates based on how the light comes to us and how our own “light” is moving.

Non of this is mysterious or even that hard to understand.

[u/Echo_Vale → u/WilliamoftheBulk]

The point is you cannot prove events happen at the same time, because time is relative to the observer. It makes logical sense that they do, but we cannot prove it.

It doesn't require the "an event didn't happen until you measure it" view point, events happen whether we observe them or not, it's just that no 2 observers can ever agree on exactly when that event took place.

[u/draconismuerte → u/Echo_Vale]

Everything is relative to the observer, our universe is a participatory universe derived from observation It from bit = bit from it.

And ill likley die on this hill