pull down to refresh

So, I want to put an end to this debate here and also to see the interests of Mr.@south_korea_ln I am unaware of his qualifications, as for me, I am still a student studying Quantum Mechanics, where time is everything.
P.S.
  1. I am an Indian, so I will pull up the Vedic concept of time, please bear with it.
  2. I believe this topic has not been discussed seriously before. I found an interesting post here #603209 by @cryotosensei, would love to hear his opinions here too.
  3. I did a small debate with @realBitcoinDog and @Undisciplined about it here #969039

"Time is a child playing with dice; the kingdom belongs to a child." — Heraclitus

Starting with the Child’s Question: “What is time?”

Time is what makes bedtime different from playtime. It’s what makes your ice cream melt, your birthday come closer, and your toys feel old. It’s the invisible river that moves everything, even when you sit still.
But try to catch it—and it slips through your fingers.

Secondly we relate The Clock and the Calendar

As we grow, time becomes more... mechanical. Seconds tick, alarms ring, days pass. We learn to fear Mondays and long for Fridays. But these are human tools—clocks don’t measure time, they measure motion. And calendars don’t know the future—they mark it, like gravestones for moments we haven't yet lived.

Newton’s Time vs Einstein’s Time

Newton thought time was absolute—a godlike constant, marching on no matter what.
Isaac Newton founded classical mechanics on the view that space is distinct from body and that time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world. For this reason he spoke of absolute space and absolute time, so as to distinguish these entities from the various ways by which we measure them (which he called relative spaces and relative times). From antiquity into the eighteenth century, contrary views which denied that space and time are real entities maintained that the world is necessarily a material plenum. Credit: Standford Encl. Wikipedia Ref
Then came Einstein, who said: Not so fast.
He showed us that time bends, stretches, and slows. Near the speed of light, a second becomes an eternity. Time is relative to motion, to gravity, to you. (Time dilation) Einstein's Theory of Time
Two twins—one flies near a black hole, one stays home. They reunite, and one has aged less. Time is not a straight line. It's a tangled, curved fabric we call spacetime. Your heartbeat, your aging, your dying—woven into it.

Now we come to the hard part: Quantum Time

In the quantum world, particles don’t care about your clocks. They can be entangled across time and space. Cause and effect? Optional. Events might be simultaneous, or in reverse. Newtonian Mechanics don't work either.
At the Planck scale—time may not even exist. Some quantum physicists (e.g. Don Page and William Wootters) have developed a theory that time is actually an emergent phenomenon resulting from a strange quantum concept known as entanglement, in which different quantum particles effectively share an existence, even though physically separated, so that the quantum state of each particle can only be described relative to the other entangled particles.
There’s research (e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s "Loop Quantum Gravity") where time is not fundamental. Instead, change is primary. Time is just a way of describing relationships between changes.
#Your Body as a Clock
Your cells don’t run on clocks—they run on rhythms. Circadian rhythms. Hormonal cycles. Memory is a biological form of time: the past encoded in neurons.
So yes, you are made of time. You are memory and decay. You are the countdown from birth to death.

The breaking point: Metaphysics and Time

Here, we approach the edge where science meets silence.
In religion, God often exists outside time—eternal, changeless. But evil? Evil is rooted in events, in moments. Without time, there's no sin, no suffering, no redemption. So how can God be timeless and yet care about what happens?
This is the paradox of eternity intervening in the temporal.
In Hinduism and Buddhism, time is cyclical—Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time. Creation, preservation, destruction—repeating endlessly. In the Bible, “a thousand years are like a day to God.” And in Islam, the Day of Judgment collapses time into a single eternal reckoning.
Eternity is not infinite time. It's timelessness—and the human brain is not built to hold it.
We don’t experience time—we experience change.
But change hurts. People leave. Bodies age. Empires fall.
We grieve because time flows. And we love because it does. To love is to say, “Even though this will end, I will still give myself to it.”
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings)
And so, time is our greatest enemy—and our only stage.

So, is Time The God of the Gaps... or the Clockmaker in the Mirror?

Maybe time is a script, and we are actors. Maybe it’s chaos, and we are dancers.
But here’s the kicker: without memory, time doesn’t exist.
So perhaps time is not something out there at all. Perhaps it is within us—a measure not of the universe, but of consciousness itself.
That would mean: to be aware is to create time. And in that case… You are the clock. Is it so? What do you think?
I only studied quantum mechanics at the undergrad level, so I look forward to @south_korea_ln unmuddying these waters.
My recollection is that time is more absolute in quantum mechanics than it is in relativity. Simultaneity is restored as a concrete concept, for instance, and t enters the equations separately from x, so time is it's own thing rather than being related to space.
reply
True. When you try to quantize gravity, you smash two totally incompatible views of time together. In relativity, time is a dimension - treated mathematically as part of a 4D spacetime manifold. So in relativity, time is embedded in the Minkowski metric tensor and is variable (dilates with motion/gravity and curves):
In Quantum Mechanics time is a fixed external parameter. It is a scalar parameter in the Schrodinger Equation that flows externally
But what's funny is, the Wheeler–DeWitt Equation which attempts to describe the quantum state of the universe:
𝐻Ψ=0 there’s no time in this equation 😂 why they did they go through so much trouble in finding it.
reply
Wheeler–DeWitt Equation
That's a long time ago. But isn't \Psi here a functional in spacetime, i.e., time treated at the same level as spatial dimensions?
By the way, we have Mathjax support here, so you can use LaTeX formatting. You just need to use double $$ instead of single ones for your equations.
reply
Haha, you made me reopen my laptop in bed and check the Wikipedia page. I see your point now about there being no time in this equation.
reply
Yeah :)
reply
By the way, we have Mathjax support here, so you can use LaTeX formatting. You just need to use double $$ instead of single ones for your equations.
Ohkk, thanks!
reply
Isn't that equation just a snapshot in time, though. If time has been assigned a value, then it won't appear as a variable.
reply
Yes, so far we have been learning about it only through the differentiated values, the snapshots, idk if there is a complete equation to define it or if it will ever be defined
reply
Thanks for tagging me. That was an interesting read.
I'm not sure if you have a specific question. I use the equations of quantum physics daily, but just as a way to make tangible predictions on the observables of condensed matter that I am interested in. The concept of time there is in its simplest and most widely used form. I don't even do anything relativistic, even though the particles that I study can formally be described by the Dirac equation, I mostly use the time-independent Schrodinger equation for everything.
Very down to earth. No metaphysical thinking, just use the probabilistic nature of the equations to make predictions that can be measured.
I usually don't think about the metaphysical aspects of it all. I haven't read a book that ponders the nature of our reality in a long time. Funny thing, though, is that I could only read them when they were written by what I considered a "real" physicist. If it were just someone who was good at thinking, but unable to grasp the equations, I would de facto discard it. The trigger that made me stop reading these kinds of books was when I was focusing on free will, and my conclusion from reading the books was that we don't have free will. It kinda made me depressed and annoying to talk to, as most people want to believe in free will. So, one day, I just decided that free will must exist, as a postulate, and it has made my life easier. But that's also probably why I just use the equations as tools now and don't think much about Everett's many-world interpretation, etc.
I'm rambling, but all this to say I don't have neither the qualifications nor a desire to go much beyond a similar approach towards the nature of time.
Still very interesting to read about it, but I don't look for it anymore.
It's a bit sad to write it out like that~~
reply
Sir this isn't the first time I've seen this. To this point in life, when I still have many years to live and die, my mom once told me, that once you become someone great in life, you'll realize it's lonely at the top.
When you know what is to be known, you lose interest in it. The creed to learn something new vanishes when there is nothing to be known. I am myself a staunch supporter of Causality and Einstein's basic formula that knowledge is inversely proportional to ego and your words are quite the result of 0 ego. It's not that I do integrations while walking but I too try to relate everyday phenomenon to physics. You have great respect from me sir. My question was about your perception of time and it has been rightly answered :) If possible, I would recommend reading the book "The Zurau Aphorisms" by Franz Kafka for just once. You won't be disappointed.

॥ अंतः अस्ति प्रारंभः ॥
reply