Time is a man -made concept. So who invented time?

Question

Strange question really and i don't expect any serious answers. But time is a man-made concept, so does that mean that there isn't such a thing as 'Time'? And who invented the idea of time?

Answer 1

Time itself is most certainly NOT a man-made concept -- it's a physical manifestation of the universe, part of the combined fourth dimension of space-time. That time has an "arrow" (goes one way only) is a proven physical concept, though the reason has yet to be discovered.

What is man-made is the way we MEASURE time. A second is an arbitrary unit of time that we made up,and all of the larger measurements based on a second. Months (originally based on how long the moon takes to orbit the earth), years (closely based on the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun), etc. all have some useful purpose, but are man-made.

Answer 2

This is actually a very interesting question. However, it seems that most of those who have responded do not accept your central premise that time is in fact a man-made concept, so it may be helpful to elaborate on this point. Here is Kant's time paradox in a nutshell: If time is infinite, then there cannot have been a beginning to time. However, an infinite period cannot be completed: it it is infinite it must go on forever. But if there is no beginning to time than an infinite period has already elapsed, which is impossible. Therefore, it cannot be the case that time had no beginning. On the other hand, if time had a beginning, there must have existed a state of no-time. In a state of no-time there can be no way of distinguishing one "moment" from the next. Yet such a state is impossible, given that time now exists. This is because of the following: if time had a beginning, there must have been a moment preceding this beginning, and this moment can be distinguished from all other moments by its proximity to the beginning of time. This is a contradiction, because in a state of no-time there is no way of distinguishing one moment from any other. Therefore, it is impossible that time had a beginning. What this suggests is that time is not a property like any other in the physical world; we cannot explain it. Yet, we can not explain anything else without it. One way out of this mess is to assert, along with Kant, that time is an a priori concept, in the sense that we cannot explain it, and yet cannot do without it.

Answer 3

Time has always been around, but it wasnt named or confined

hours and minutes were man made, but days and years are the worlds own, defined by sunlight

no one invented the idea of time, they just found an explanation, a name, a definition and a measuring scale

Answer 4

There's no such thing as time. It is an empty concept beyond the relation of the motion of objects to any given (relatively) constant repeating motion, i.e. the movement of the sun or the hands of a clock.

Answer 5

Are you kidding? You say “Strange question really and i don't expect any serious answers.” Yes, indeed. I think it is a darn good question. No serious answers? I think not!

Were my soap box? Ok I got it.

Time is not a human invention it is a product of human observation. The measurement and units of time however are human inventions. That makes time analogous to distance. Why analogous? Have you ever tried to go back in time?

Answer 6

Time does exist, but our standard understanding of it is not a true reflection of "real" time.

Basically, we understand time as being totally linear, constant, and not as a relative concept. However, time varies relative to the difference in momentum between 2 objects - so even at slow speeds, you have a relatively different time frame to objects at a different momentum (say, travelling in the opposite direction, stationary, or travelling slower or faster). Just normally this is too small to notice. You'd only notice it as you approached light speed relative to another object (or they approached light speed relative to you).

Another thing about our standard definition of time is that it is absolute, it can be divided into smaller and smaller quantities, and can be zero. In reality, there is a time concept (called Planck's time) that is the shortest possible time for anything to occur in - nothing can occur in less time than Planck's time, and there is no such thing as "no time" within our frame of reference. However, Planck's time is so small as too be negligable in every day situations.

So our "normal" concept of time is historical - it comes from early mans' (and possibley pre-human) attempt to understand and quantify the world - it started with concepts such as days, months, years, which are all cyclic, then moved on to concepts such as hours (by measuring the length of shadows), then later on minutes and seconds. It was developed over millenia, and more recently has been defined by using radioactive half lives (which stay amazingly constant). However, that is standard human time (at a relatively constant frame of reference) - relative time occurs at much greater speeds, and Planck's time occurs for extremely small particles in a practicle sense.

Answer 7

Time is simply a word that we use to measure the rate of change.

Time and change are really the same thing. If there was no change there would be nothing to measure time by. What I am saying is, that time does not exist independently of change.

I agree with your assertion that time has been invented by man.
We need it to make sense of our lives and to measure change.

If man didn't exist, change would simply occur and there would be no need to measure it. So the concept of time would simply be redundant.

Answer 8

I don't think time was a concept that was invented. It was nature.

Day turns into night and night into day.....Seasons occurr. That isn't a man made concept, that is reality.

A man put a name to it but that was it.

Answer 9

Time was 'invented' as a convenient way to measure the distance between periodic events, ie: the rotations and cycles of the planets from which our present day time system is derived

Answer 10

the earliest man kept time - but not in hours and minutes but days and seasons. the mordern concept of time, of hours minutes and seconds is a greek concept.
they divided a circle into parts of the day hence the 360 degree design - each "minute" is 6 degrees from the center.