What is Time?

What is time?  No one is really sure; we measure it in years, months, days hours and seconds, time is also motion and we measure speed in miles per hour.

We are slaves to time, it dictates when we sleep, wake, eat and work, we live our lives swept up in the whirls and eddies of a relentless river that is our creator and will be our destroyer when worn out by time our bodies die and are spat out.

We live our lives surfing on the record stylus of the present as it carves its way through time.  Time is a river which flows from it's source, the singularity of the big bang at the galactic centre.  As the universe expands so doe’s time, in a sense our ancestors are still back there, they’re just closer to the big bang than we are.

Personal Perception of Time

Our perception of time seems to speed up as we grow older, is this because the heart rate slows? Or is it a matter of comparison.  Imagine you have five coins stacked on a table, take a coin and hold it in your hand, it seems a large amount.  Now imagine one hundred coins on the table, the coin in your hand now seems a small amount compared with the number of years we have hoarded away.

Sit still and you are aware of the passing of time as the present becomes the past which only exists in memory, move through the world and you are conscious of moving through not only space but time.  Time has an effect on inanimate objects, a mountain will be worn away to a stone which in turn will be worn away to a grain of sand.

Imagine you are on a train passing stations crowded with people, minutes pass and you can no longer see the people, but they are still there, you’re just further down the line.  Our lives are overlapping lengths of string weaved together to make one big rope, all parts exist but only the present part of our small string can be experienced.  Before our birth billions of years passed without our knowledge and when our string runs out billions more will pass unknown.  But our small string of existence will still be part of time.

Time is Relative

Time is relative, that is relative to the observer, the closer we get to the speed of light the slower time would be if seen by a stationary observer, if I jumped in a rocket and was viewed from a telescope on earth, I would appear to be in slow motion, even though my experience of time would be normal.  I would also arrive back on earth younger than if I had stayed.

Time Travel

To navigate the emptiness of space between solar systems we have to travel close to the speed of light if we want to make the trip within a lifetime, we don’t presently have the technology to do this but when we do the passage of time experienced by an interstellar traveller would be like time travel to someone who was earth bound, fifty years on earth could seem but a year to the traveler.

There is another shortcut to the stars or through time, remember the analogy that time is a river, with whirls and eddies, if these eddies were worm holes through time and space it would be possible to pass through one and travel though time or across vast distances.

The End of Time

With time flowing outwards in an expanding Universe where is time heading?  If expansion is infinite then time is infinite, however if the universe slows and then contracts how will we experience time if time starts to run backwards?   


Time can be stretched and bent by large objects of mass as a pebble stretches the skin of a drum.

At every centre of a galaxy sits a dark eater of worlds called a black hole that consume not only space but time.  If the space time we existed in got caught in the massive gravitational pull then time would be stretched and accelerated as it got sucked towards the singularity, how would we experience the passage of time if we could live to tell the tale?