Time is a very strange thing. Sometimes it goes quickly, and sometimes it goes incredibly slow. At the moment, there are a lot of theories designed to explain what time is, and why it is so mysterious. And some of these theories are quite unusual.
1. St. Augustine's theory of time
Saint Augustine, the Christian philosopher, had a peculiar idea of time. First of all, he believed that time is not infinite. Time, according to him, was created by God, besides, it is absolutely impossible to create something infinite.
When something remains in the past, it no longer has any properties of being, because it no longer exists.
And Augustine also believed that time actually exists only in our consciousness and depends only on how we interpret it. We can say that something lasts long or not too long, but Augustine argued that there is no real way to objectively assess it.
When something remains in the past, it no longer has any properties of being, because now it does not exist. And when we say that something “took too long”, it is because we remember this “something” in that way.
And since we measure time based only on how we remember it, therefore, it should exist only in our memory. As for the future, it does not exist yet, so it is impossible to measure it. There is only the present, so the only logical conclusion is that the concept of time dwells exclusively in our heads.
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2. Topology of time
What does time look like? If you try to imagine it, will you imagine it as a straight line that never ends? Or maybe you think of something like a clock, the hands of which go round and round every day and every year?
Obviously there is no right answer, but there are some intriguing ideas around this.
Aristotle believed that time cannot exist as a line. At least it has no beginning or end, despite the fact that there must be a time when it all began. And if you imagine the moment when it all started, then you have to mark the point before that moment. And if the world ceases to exist, then another point will appear, after this moment.
It is also completely incomprehensible how many time lines there can be. Could it be just one line of time, directed forward, or are there many of these lines, they are directed parallel to each other, or vice versa - intersect?
Can time be one line divided into many segments? Could it be that moments in the stream of time exist completely independently of each other? There are a lot of opinions about all this. And not a single answer.
3. Plausible present
The idea of a “believable present” attempts to answer the question of how long this present lasts. The usual answer associated with this is “now,” but not very informative.
For example, when in the course of a conversation we reach the middle of a sentence, does this mean that we have already finished the beginning of a sentence, and it is left in the past? And the conversation itself - is it in the present? Or is there only part of the conversation in the present, and part of it is already in the past?
E. R. Clay and William James put forward the idea of a “believable present,” which is the span of time we experience as present. According to Clay and James, this moment lasts only a few seconds and cannot last more than a minute, and this is the amount of time that we are consciously aware of.
But even within this framework, there is something to argue over.
In theory, all of the above can be associated with a person's short-term memory - the better this memory, the longer the present. There is also an opinion that all this is just a matter of instant perception.
Once you rely on your short-term memory, that moment can no longer be a part of the present. That is, there is a problem of the "plausible present", and something like the "expanded present", which arises immediately after the "plausible present" has disappeared.
In fact, the present should not have any duration at all, because if it does, part of the present is immediately in the past, and part in the future, and a contradiction arises. And the "plausible present" tries to explain the present as a kind of long period of time, and this is very controversial.
4. Short people perceive "now" earlier than tall people
It sounds strange, but it makes sense. This theory was put forward by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, and he called it "timing."
All of this is based on the idea that we perceive the world by receiving certain information packets that are collected by our senses and then processed by the brain. Information from different parts of the body reaches the brain at different times.
Let's say you are walking, texting someone an SMS, and suddenly bang your head against a telegraph pole. At the same time, you also injure your big toe about the same post. In theory, information about a head injury should reach your brain faster than information about a big toe injury. However, you will think that you felt it all at the same time.
This is because the brain is a kind of sensory structure with a clear organization. And this structure builds things for us in ascending order of their meaning.
The above delay in processing information plays into the hands of short people. Because a shorter person feels a more accurate version of time, because in his case, information takes less time to get into the brain.
5. Time is slowing down and we can see it
One of the long-standing problems in physics is associated with the existence of dark energy. We can see the effects of this energy, but we have no idea what it is.
A team of professors from Spain believes that all efforts to find dark energy were in vain simply because it does not exist. They believe that all the effects of dark energy can be explained by the alternative idea that in fact we see time dilation before its possible stopping.
Take an astronomical phenomenon known as redshift. When we see stars glowing red, we know that they are accelerating. A group of Spanish professors explains the phenomenon of the acceleration of the universe not as a result of the presence of dark energy in it, but as an illusion created by the slowing down of time.
The light has enough time to reach us. And when this finally happens, time slows down, creating the illusion that everything around is accelerating. Time stops extremely, unimaginably slowly, but if we take into account the vastness of outer space and its mind-boggling distances, it turns out that we can see how time slows down just by looking at the stars.
6. Time doesn't exist
There is also an opinion that time does not exist at all. This is precisely what the philosopher McTaggart (JME McTaggart) argued at the beginning of the last century. According to McTaggart, two approaches are permissible when considering time.
The first approach is called A-Theory.
It says that time has a certain order and flows continuously, that things in it are organized the way we see them. And that events move from the past to the present and then to the future.
B-Theory, on the other hand, asserts that the acceptance of time frames and time itself is an illusion, and there is no way to make all events in the world happen in a strictly defined order.
This version of "time" is supported only by our memories, and in our memory, as a rule, individual events are recorded, and we remember them as separate "temporary pockets", and not as a kind of continuous stream.
Taking into account this theory, it can be proved that time does not exist, since in order for time to exist, a continuous change in events, the world and circumstances is required. B-theory, by definition, does not refer to the passage of time, and there is no talk of changes either. Thus, time does not exist.
However, if the A-Theory is correct, then the statement that there is no time seems too hasty. For example, take the day you turned 21. On the one hand, this day was in the future. On the other hand, the same day will be in the past. But one and the same moment cannot be simultaneously in the past, in the present and in the future. That is why McTaggart says that A-Theory is contradictory, and therefore impossible, like time itself.
7. Theory of four dimensions and the block of the Universe
The theory of four dimensions and the block of the Universe is associated with the concept of time as a real dimension. There is a version that all objects exist in four dimensions, not three. The fourth dimension is time.
And in it, objects can also be viewed from the point of view of their three dimensions, that is, three dimensions. The block theory of the Universe represents the entire Universe as a block of measurements, separated by "layers" of time.
This block has length, width and height, and for everything in this block, for each event, there are certain layers of time. Each person is a four-dimensional object that exists in different layers of time. There is a layer of time for infancy, there is a layer for childhood, for adolescence, and so on.
Thus, the time layer has no past, present or future. However, each point within a block of the Universe can be either past, or present, or future in relation to other points in time in this block.
8. Time dilation effect
Sometimes we hear stories of people who are caught in a life-threatening or terrible situation. And these people swear that time slows down in such situations. This slowdown is often felt during events that defy explanation or events that happened suddenly. This is a common phenomenon, and it has already become the subject of a lot of discussions about what we actually experience.
The researchers decided to find out what would happen if time did slow down. For example, we could get a better look at many things because our brains have a bad habit of mixing similar stimuli into one common event if the interval between stimuli is less than 80 milliseconds.
One experiment was carried out.
The subjects were asked to look at the numbers that were flashing and constantly changing. So scientists wanted to determine the point at which the brain stops paying attention to time and a person begins to distinguish between different series of numbers.
At first, the experiment was carried out under normal conditions, and then they decided to repeat it under extreme conditions: the participants were asked to look at a series of flashing numbers, falling from a tower with a height of 46 m.
They were then asked to watch other people fall from the same tower and rate how long those falls were compared to theirs.
The subjects' own fall seemed 36% longer. In addition, in extreme situations, people are better able to identify the flashing numbers. And all this suggests that it is not some moment in time that slows down for us, but that our memory of this moment slows down.
And while the practical benefits of the effect of time dilation may be surprising, it should not be forgotten that the same effect can very well make the terrible events in our memory last forever.
9. Chronos, Kronos and Time
Even before the attempts of Greek philosophers to explain time, time had a mythological explanation.
Before the beginning of time, there were only primordial gods - Chronos and Ananke. Chronos was the god of time, and was part man, part lion and part bull.
Ananke was a serpent coiled around the egg of the world and a symbol of eternity. Even Chronos in Greco-Roman mythology is often depicted standing in the zodiacal circle, where he is portrayed as a man, and this man can be both young and old.
Chronos was the father of the Titans and is often confused with Kronos, who was also associated with time. It was Kronos who overthrew and then castrated his own father, and was later killed by his own son, Zeus.
Chronos was the one in charge of the seasons and the passage of time in general. But for the things that happened to men and women during this time, it was not Chronos who was responsible, but someone else.
The life cycle of a person, his birth, growing up, aging and death, was the area of responsibility of those who were called the goddesses of fate - Moira. Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis determined human destiny, and finally, Atropos cut the thread, and a person's life ended there.
10. We measure time poorly
When it comes to the physics of space, about time, about dimensions and everything that comes with them, then time is perhaps the most difficult to explain.
We don't actually measure time very well.
On the one hand, there is sidereal time, that is, time measured by the position of the stars and the rotation of the Earth. It is obvious that this time, although it varies, is very insignificant.
However, in the 20th century, astronomers found that the rotation of the planet was slowing down, so another scale was created - ephemeris time.
Even later, the so-called topocentric time (TDT) appeared, which was considered the most accurate, since it was based on International Atomic Time (IAT). In 1991, atomic time was renamed Earth time (TT). And if tracking time zones today may seem difficult to someone, then we should not forget that even today the position of stars and other celestial bodies is used in combination with Earth time, since this is how its maximum accuracy is achieved.
All this says only one thing: we still have no idea what to do with time, despite the fact that we live by it every day.