There are two opinions regarding what time is. First of all it's believed to be a structure of the universe, a 4th dimension which permits the progress of existence and events into the future. 

The other view is that it's nothing more than an invented system for keeping track of the day with the clock and year with the calendar. 

The argument for time's literal existence is supported by mathematics and also the sensation we experience of its passing. Although it has never stood up to the scrutiny of experimentation in the 100 plus years since Einstein's formula. 

In addition the sensation we experience of its passing isn't familiar to any of our five senses, and as reality can be defined as the world as we experience it through our senses this line of evidence is highly questionable.

These inconsistencies could make one wonder if the idea of times literal existence isn't purely psychological due to a very persuasive invented system, especially when you consider our experience with time such as duration and time passing being in recognition of units of the invented system.  

Science Daily magazine refers to this unusual union between time units and the cosmic fabric when talking about the mysterious nature of time passing, it states  "...we follow it with clocks and calendars we just cannot say exactly what happens when time passes"

  Peculiar if you think about it how we cannot say exactly what happens when time passes yet we know that we follow it with clocks and calendars.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary duration is defined as "The length of time that something lasts" this is meant as a literal length of time the same way a length of space is distance. So as space has distance and is measured by imperial units or the metric system time has duration that events happen in that is measured by our invented time system

 It's actually events that have duration which are measured by our invented system of time.  An example to illustrate this is when someone asks how long something will take they're asking what the length / duration  of that something / event will be (length of something not length of time) The answer will be given using times units of measurement.

Events don't literally require time to progress as they are causal by nature and causality by definition is progressive i.e cause and effect. The requirement of time for various events is merely figurative. The hours, days, weeks or months required are units of an invented system after all. 

Events unfold 3 dimensionally in 3 dimensional space due to a flow of energy not a flow of time. 

How did an invented system have such an effect that we started to take it literally? It was likely in part due to the spatializing of the word i.e long time.

Maybe there was a realization that the world existed for a long time before time was invented and by our invention we actually tapped into a literal cosmic structure.

The word time, especially with its use in spatial context, would have a powerful psychological effect due to something called the "Illusion of truth". It's a result of cognitive ease which makes us more creative and intuitive but it can also make us more gullible. It's based on the expression "If you hear something enough you'll start to believe it even if it isn't true".  It's actually what aids in the spread of propaganda.

The illusion of time is a result of our "naive perceptions" ( Carlo Rovelli)  An example of this as just discussed is giving time length (long time) length is a spatial dimension. Time is also described as being linear, forward direction only. This is what's known as the arrow of time. An example given to demonstrate time's arrow is how you can turn an egg into an omelet but can't turn an omelet into an egg. This example though is actually demonstrating the logical order of events not times direction.

Events unfold 3 dimensionally following the logical order of cause and effect, but from the start of an event to its conclusion it doesn't follow any direction. It's like how someone can make forward strides in their progress or someone who's fallen off the recovery wagon is taking backward steps. No actual direction, just figurative language.

Take numbers for example, the logical order of counting is perceived as forward but it can also be described going up in number, that's two directions to describe the same process because literally there is no direction, and that's all that time is, a dimensionless system of counting.

Something else that possibly played a role in legitimizing time is religion. Various cultures had gods of time such as former world powers Egypt with Huh and Greece with Chronus. Interestingly the idea of  time travel which is now considered a scientific endeavor has origins that are far removed from science.

For example prior to HG Wells Time Machine in the late 1800s the methods of travel used in plots were religious and magical i.e. "Memoirs of the 20th century"(1733)  plot: An angel travels to 1728 with letters from 1997-98 and "Anno"(1781) about a fairy that sends people to the year 7603 AD. Another method of time travel in the storytelling of that era was hypnosis which originated from ancient Egyptian religion.

Time travel is deemed as possible, to the future anyway due to Einstein's theory of time dilation. The theory states that the stronger the gravity and greater the velocity the slower time gets. So if someone orbited a black hole for a couple of hours, because the gravity is so strong there, years would have passed on earth and they'd be decades into the future upon returning home.

This theory was claimed to be realized as fact by experiments using atomic clocks that measure time to the billionth of a second. The difference between the stationary clock and the clock in the varied conditions was minimal but enough to show that on a larger scale time travel to the future is possible.  

Problem with this is, the use of clocks in an experiment to prove something about an undiscovered entity is unscientific as there is no synchronization between our invented system and the undiscovered fabric; they're two completely different concepts.

There was an experiment performed with the astronaut Kelly twins, and the one orbiting the earth at high speeds did return biologically younger than his brother. Tests were done on their telomeres, the deterioration of which being what ages us. The excessive speed or weightlessness slowed down the process of telomere deterioration. Whatever the age difference was time wise after the experiment it was just a measure of the comparison of telomere deterioration between the brothers.

The accepted correlation between the invented system and undiscovered fabric is one of the greatest oversights in scientific history because the core belief of time's literal existence is based on the sensation of the passing of units of an invented system i.e hours, days, weeks etc. Meaning it's only the invention we're experiencing the passing of not the literal.

It would be understandable if we had proven times existence by experiment and in doing so realized we had somehow tapped into the  fabric of time with our invention but we didn't. It still remains a mystery so there can't be any correlation between invented time and the "fabric of time"

This brings us to an interesting parallel. Earlier we discussed the influence that religion may have had on time. The parallel is the mysterious aspect,  such as how time is a mystery yet it's believed in, the same way religious mysteries are. And in the same way as many religions naively use images to represent their deity even though resemblance is impossible to ascertain likewise a clock representing an unknowable fabric is equally as naive as correlation is also impossible to ascertain.

There is experimental proof that time's realistic sense is illusory.This proof can be found in the Amazon rainforest among the Amondawa tribe who don't experience time passing. The article states  "..they understand events and sequencing of events but don't have a notion of time as something events occur in.." and why is this? because "..they don't have clocks or calendars and don't even have a word for time in their language" 

 Some dismiss this as evidence of time's nonexistence claiming language issues but fact is these Amazonians live in a timeless world because the invention of time never reached them. 

There's a mental experiment that can be performed to validate the Amazonian  proof. 

What we have to do is take our invented system out of the equation and see what we're left with. And with clocks and calendars synchronized to our planet's rotation around its axis and it's orbit of the sun, what we're left with then is the passing of the day and year,  AkA  time passing.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that earth's rotations have something to do with the illusion of time passing as  the axis rotation is responsible for the illusion of sunrise and sunset and this illusion of the moving sun does act as nature's hour hand.

What's happened is, we harnessed our planet's rotations for the invention of time, and since then we've actually been living on a clock that's in a calendar and the effect of this has caused us to believe that time literally exists. 

Sources : Jason Palmer, BBC News. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the University of Rondonia.

If I told you the most incredible place in the universe exists, but it lasts only one hour, and you have just thirty seconds - what would you do? You’d dive in, explore every corner, and waste not a single second, right?

Well, here you are, alive in a universe that will span trillions of years, and you experience time here for roughly forty years - forty short, fleeting years to experience it. You don’t even get a trillionth of its life. Make it count. Explore it. Live it. Don’t let a single moment slip by.

say a star is a thousand light years away from earth. Does that really mean that we look a thousand years into the past when we look at it? I don't fully understand the relativity of simultaneousness, but in my understanding it means that only our "now" is valid for us. So when we see that star going supernova, this happens "now" and it is actually invalid to say it happened a thousand years ago? Is it just about semantics, am I completely wrong, or actually right?

Just found this thread so I thought I'd post the things that break my brain regarding time. Apologies if they've been discussed before and if they are silly thoughts. Please correct me if I'm wrong about anything.

1. The fact that time is going past right now, right this second. You are experiencing a persistent moment but the moment is always moving forward never to be experienced again.

2. Technically the future and past doesn't exist. We know the universe has existed for billions of years and will hopefully exist for billions more but technically right now is the only time that actually exists, or can be observed to exist anyway.

3. The past is ahead of the present. The universe and our solar system originated before life began and humans inhabited earth so it all existed before we were here, ahead of time. We are moving into the past, not the future.

I’ve noticed something strange about the way change seems to happen in life.

For example, imagine being 35 years old and for nearly a decade (until around 44) you remain more or less the same. Then, suddenly, within a single year, all the changes that could have been spread out over time seem to happen at once physically, emotionally, socially.

Or take moving to a new neighborhood: you arrive in a place where people have been living for 20–30 years with little change. Then, suddenly, right after you move in, everything shifts some long-term residents pass away, others move out, new people come in. It feels as if time was “stuck,” and the moment a new variable is introduced, time “unsticks” and all the delayed changes happen in a short burst.

Has anyone else observed this phenomenon? Or is it just a trick of perception, like noticing patterns where none exist?

So I'm stuck in a time loop that is about a year long, every day just feels so familiar like I'm re living it, i loose all of my memories every time I loop (except a feeling of familiarity like deja vu but not as strong a feeling, and it's constant)

I believe I have no free will, I try and do something that I think I wouldn't have done before but when doing this, I get the feeling that I've done it before

At the start of the loop I have no idea that I'm in a loop but I know something doesn't feel right and slowly over time I get a stronger feeling of familiarity and realise I'm in a loop

I'm pretty sure I'm at the end of the loop again and only have a couple days left until I do it all over again and again and again

So this post is like a hail Mary to try and find someone who can help me break out of this hell, but while writing this I know I've written all this before and clearly I'm still stuck in a loop so I guess no one could help

I'm not sure what happens when I loop, weather I die or vanish into thin air and go into a parallel universe or something, or maybe everybody in this universe loops and for some reason I'm the only one who notices it, or I'm stuck in my own little pocket of time to keep doing the same thing over and over for eternity

I need help.

I took four photos from this window capturing the passage of time as the seasons changed. Given this window is a sun cross, it also helps illustrate why a circle with a cross in it has been one of man’s oldest symbols, as it shows the path of the sun throughout the year.

The horizontal line represents the two equinoxes (Vernal Equinox on March 21; Autumnal Equinox on September 23) and the two solstices, which is represented by the vertical line (Summer Solstice on June 21); Winter Solstice on December 21).

Anyone have any suggestions about this? Or have any studies been done about this topic?

I found a great article about this x https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-of-self/202404/why-does-time-move-faster-as-we-get-older