What is time ? How is it defined and how it is related as a third dimention ?

Question

"Time" as a concept is really confusing. Want to understand conceptually.

Answer 1

It is a means of measurement of events that are taking place around us. Think of the days when people have relied on shadows produced by sun to be a measure of time. They only understood that day and night repeat. When the earth rotation of sun was understood, what we now term as 24 hrs a day came into being. The past also was surmised to be at this time as Roman, mayan civilisation etc., hence wthout time the relative intervals of events cannot be placed and with new scientific inventions we are able to pin point happenings to part of seconds also.
The various calendars that have been made at different parts of the world also have taken events that have taken place as the basis or zero. When scientific inventions result in exact no of rotations of earth that have taken place or earth got formed from the Sun, then that can be a basis and a new unit can be had for a fourth dimension.
Ramachandran V.

Answer 2

Consult a book about the origin of the Universe. Last time I read, it was around 13 to 17 billion years ago that the Big Bang occurred. The instant of the Big bang is considered the beginning of time and the cosmological model that explains it is the Einstein-de Sitter Universe, in which space is infininite and the Universe expands for ever. The end of time will come when all stars in all galaxies exhaust their nuclear fuel, gigantic black holes will form, the temperature will be absolute zero, all known physical forces will disappear, all that will be left is energy, and nothing will ever change. Time ceased to exist because there are no observers to keep track of it. However, in a closed model of the Universe, as it contracts, galaxies and stars will collide with one another until everything is infinitely compressed in a singularity again, the Big Crunch, 30 billion years from now. And after that another cycle will begin, life will appear again in planets like Earth. And perhaps there have been more of these cycles before. If this is how the Universe really is we still have some time to figure out what time is and what will we do with it.

Answer 3

Time is sometimes referred as the fourth dimension but still is an abstract concept, you can measure the happening of events with time, but time itself doesn't exist, it is an invention of our own.
Time and How Light propagates are closely related, if you were to travel at the speed of light and look backwards you will see a world put on 'pause' if you look forward you see things happening fast forward as in a VCR. Suppose that you grab a telescope today so powerful to see the events in a distant galaxy that is 10 billion light years, then you were actually seeing the galaxy as it was 10 billion years ago, if you were to teleport to that galaxy instantly you may find many changes have occurred since then or even the galaxy may not even exist anymore or may have move away from the place you thought it was.
Simply put, time is an abstract concept that help us measure past, present and future.
Mankind will never be able to travel through time the way sciencie fiction portray it.

Answer 4

Time can be a state, as in "the meeting starts at 12:45", or the length of an interval, as in "the meeting lasted 3 hours", or a sum of lengths of intervals, as in "I spent 20 hours on this project". In the latter case time is often seen as a commodity ("I have little time.")

Time has long been a major subject of philosophy, art, poetry, and science. There are widely divergent views about its meaning; hence it is difficult to provide an uncontroversial definition of time. Scholars disagree on whether time itself can be measured or is itself part of the measuring system. Many fields use an operational definition in which the only definition attempted is that of the units used.

The measurement of time has also occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in astronomy. Time is also a matter of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in our lives. Units of time have been agreed upon to quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them. Regularly recurring events and objects with apparent periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples are the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, and the swing of a pendulum.

Time has historically been closely related with space, most obviously with spacetime in Einstein's General Relativity.

Answer 5

most of the above is a lot of bollox....

dT= t2-t1/square roots of v2-v1/C that's relativity

time is just as real as space it doesn't have beginning or end...the law that govern the way it changes does and that law started with the big bang

it can be reversed too....for small particles of matter time has very little meaning...for example...photons can go from A to B using all the available directions at once and simultaniusly so that time is completly irrelevant to them...

only when gravity start to have an effect on things the arrow of time appears

however the real nature of time is difficult to determine and it changes relativle to what kind of space you're investigating

Answer 6

"Time" is in reality nothing more than a "measuring-stick" which began at the moment when God Created the Universe. When God "Spoke"..."Let there be light, and there was light; and
God saw that it was good." At that precise moment, time began. "Time" will no longer be in existance when God "Creates a new heavens and a new Earth...because in that, everything will be eternal and exist for all eternity...and eternity CANNOT BE MEASURED. This is and should be very easy to comprehend and understand...that "time" can exist only in the present creation, which will come to an end even as the Bible says that it will. But in the New Creation, there will be no such thing...because there, we will be "everlasting"...which is something you cannot "measure"...my friend.

Answer 7

The first dimension is a point, when lined up infinately you form a plane. When you stack planes up infinately you get depth, The 3rd dimension. When you line up these next to each other you get time. I think of it like a 3d flipbook. Just as we travel to the local 7-11 we travel in time only we have a very limited range at which speeds we can travel at.

Answer 8

If it werent for time there wouldnt be distance or space. If we werent subject to time we could be anywhere anytime, since we measure distance and space by the amount of time to travel it.

I believe they consider time to be like a plane, that can wrinkle and fold, and we move at a set rate across it.

I think its more like a line, and everything moves along that line at different predetermined speeds. But iam not a genious, so what do i know.

Answer 9

Time is simply the measurement of mass in motion.

You could make a spedometer for an automobile in thingys per parsec- thats all it really is.

Notice that it simply describes time, and doesn't give an actuall DEFINTION of what time is.

Actually right now, Time is being treated as an electromagnetic force.

Answer 10

Time - Something that we do not have enough of.

If you move from point A to point B in the third dimension, time would be used to determine how long it took and what rate of speed you used.