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Does time really exist? or is it a human invention and convention? What is the truth? are there time particles? please remember, I'm looking for constructive answers, not condescending and void ones.

Qmechanic
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Bak1139
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  • Time particles don't exist. The rest of the question is something which Physics can't answer. – jinawee Jun 20 '14 at 08:36
  • The question about existence of time looks more of philosophy than physics. – Ruslan Jun 20 '14 at 08:57
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    @Bak1139 If you do not like condescending or void answers, you might like to improve the way you are asking: What do you mean precisely when asking "does time exist"? "Existence" is not a property we usually ascribe to coordinates. What do you even mean by "time particles"? Particles are excitations of fields, and coordinates are not fields. No part of your question is in terms that would be physically well-defined, so you should not expected physically well-defined answers. – ACuriousMind Jun 20 '14 at 13:01
  • Related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69252/ – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jun 20 '14 at 14:38
  • Time is by its own nature a measure of change. We perceive that systems change and we also notice that some systems change in a regular pattern. Time is a measure of how much our environment has changed using these regular patterns as a basis. If nothing in the universe changes, no time has passed nor would we experience time. On this basis, you could call it an invention of humans, but I believe you would be in error. Time does exist. It exists as much as gravity, space, and human memory. To think otherwise is literally ignorant, given the evidence in favour of it. – Jim Jun 20 '14 at 14:39
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    This is hardly an answer – Bak1139 Jun 25 '14 at 11:59

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There are physicists who have said things about time not existing, such as Julian Barbour. This is a sensationalised way of describing an idea about physics that may or may not be true. It doesn't mean that there are no clocks or that clocks don't measure anything. Rather, it means something like this. If you had the complete series of configurations for all the objects and fields in the universe, at each time but you didn't have the time labels for those configurations there would be a way of arranging them in a series because the contents of configurations with very different contents would be farther separated in time than those with similar contents.

For more on this idea see

http://www.platonia.com/

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/220/

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/221/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5rExaKLEoU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHTetNk378.

alanf
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  • Kurt Goedel showed with the use of General relativity that time might not exist (possibly under some circumstances). It also seems that the scientific community has not really accepted his argumentation. I also admit I have not understood why. So I cannot say much about it. But it shows that the question is not so trivial as it looks like. – Frederic Thomas Jun 26 '14 at 17:05