If time has been an ongoing thing, then when did it REALLY begin?

Answer 1

Time is a place which exists in a forever state of being, which means in theory we should be able to travel forward and backward in time. Some scientists seriously believe we will someday.

Excerpt from the cover story on time travel in Astronomy magazine, February 2006:

<... [H.G.] Wells proved to be ahead of his time scientifically as well as artistically. He imagined time as occupying the fourth dimension 10 years before Albert Einstein portrayed the cosmos as a 4-dimensional space-time continuum ... Einstein's ideas opened the door to scientific inquiry into time travel...

Although the day when you can hop into a time machine and travel anywhere - or anywhen - you want lies a long way off, limited forms of time travel into the future already exist. Thanks to their greater speed, airline passengers emerge from their trips having aged slightly less than their earthbound compatriots. Now, some scientists speculate that travel into the past - something Wells' time traveler could do with the pull of a lever - might be possible one day.

... Newton considered time, and space for that matter, as immutable... That all changed with Einstein. He believed - and a century of experimental results back him up - time is relative.

... Jump on a spaceship and travel at close to lightspeed and you literally could cover lightyears in just a few days by your reckoning. On your return to Earth, however, you'd find that perhaps thousands of years had elapsed. In effect, you would have traveled to the stars as well as deep into the future.

As crazy as time travel to the future may sound, experiments verify it... Subatomic particles called muon offer more striking proof...

Speed is one way to leap into the future. Gravity is another... Einstein extended his theory to all types of motion and showed that gravity is a manifestation of space-time curvature. Just like special theory, general relativity offers a method of time travel: a strong gravitional field.

...Many time-travel afficinadoes would rather travel to the past [than to the future]. University of Connecticut physicist and time-travel researcher Ronald Mallett counts himself in this group. "My father died of a heart attack when I was 10, and shortly after that, I read The Time Machine. I thought if I could build a real time machine, I could go back and warn him."

Traveling in that direction proves a tougher theoretical challenge for physicists.... [According to Einstein's equations conducted by Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel in 1949, there is] a rotating universe. He found that such a universe allows an astronaut to visit his or her own past by traveling through space...

[O]bservations show general relativity allows travel to the past...

Another idea proves more promising. As early as 1935, Einstein and a colleague, Nathan Rosen, realized that general relativity allows the existence of "bridges" in space-time... these space-time tubes now have the more poetic name "wormholes." ...Wormholes act as shortcuts that can connect distant regions of space-time. So, by voyaging through a wormhole, you could travel between two regions faster than a beam of light moving through normal space-time...

It wasn't long before [Kip] Thorne [a black hole expert at Cal-Tech who worked with Carl Sagan] and his colleagues realized that a stable wormhole could form the basis for a time machine...

The best known example [of time travel paradoxes] is the so-called grandfather paradox. Imagine you can travel back in time, to the days of your grandfather's youth. What if you ... killed him before he met your grandmother? In that case, your father never would have been born -- and neither would you. But it you never existed, how could you have traveled back in time to kill your grandfather? ... One way physicists interpret the uncertainty principle's implications is called the "many worlds" theory. In this view, parallel universe exist, representing all possibilities.

Applied to time travel, the many-worlds picture holds that each time a decision is made or an observation recorded, the universe branches. If true, it means you could go back in time and kill your grandfather. That act would leave you, the time traveler, in a universe with a dead grandfather. But the alternate universe - with a grandfather who gave life to your mother, and who, in turn, gave birth to the time traveler - also survives... >

Answer 2

It probably depends on who you're asking. A philosopher will likely tell you something cryptic like, time has no beginning and no end, and leave you to try and comprehend just how the f*** that all works out. An astrophysicist, on the other hand, one who still subscribes to the big bang theory, can cite a pretty specific time, calculated from the speed and position of the gallaxies, that the big bang occurred, releasing time along with everything else in the universe.

Answer 3

The whole issue of time gets very confusing because of the physical spectrum of energies and how it can be slightly manipulated with gravity, so let's take it back to the very beginning - before The Big Bang.

Before there was a physical universe, there was discarnate consciousness, i.e., non-corporeal life in the Spirit.

Time is a condition of consciousness; it is how reality is experienced.

When there is no consciousness, there is no linear time.

Hence, time began when the first consciousness emerged in the Spirit.

Answer 4

Stephen, in the words of Edgar Allen Poe, "Everything we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Including time and space. Hard to wrap your brain around but picture a lemniscate (infinity symbol) that is the closest I can get to explaining what (I think) time looks like. No beginning - no end. Great question btw!

Answer 5

According to Kurt Vonnegut, time has no start or end, and it goes on continuously, not linearly. What I'm trying to say is that our view of time is like a ribbon, and we put dates, hours, etc, on the ribbon and think that's that. In Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut says that every instant of time happens at once, and you just be when you want to be.

Answer 6

Ongoing.....that sounds like something that had a beginning...it must have been that point where nothing became something.

Answer 7

Time, as humans understand it, started with Genesis 1:1

Answer 8

time and space are interchangeable. I had the answer one night, it all made sense, and I felt SO enlightened. When I tried to organize my thoughts to tell my husband, the idea went out of my head. Conclusion: we are not supposed to know how it works, but flashes of understanding like that give us faith.

Answer 9

What exactly is time? Is it made up so we can keep track of things? Is it something, then if so, how much is there? Maybe it is just existence, and we make up parts (minutes, etc.) to keep track of our life on earth.

Time to go.

Answer 10

Your question is the answer. At the beginning.

Answer 11

it didn't begin. the universe has always existed, and therefore, time has always existed.