Do you believe that time flows forever backward as well as forward?

Question

Why is it so hard for most people to comprehend the idea of eternity past but yet wholly comprehend eternity future? In order for one to exist, the other has to, thus the definition of eternity. Help me show this fact to my friends please!

P.S. This is not neccessarily a religious question. Scientists hold the same argument about energy and matter that Christians do about God

Answer 1

I had this whole argument written about how you were wrong and then I thought about it. So I had to delete it all.

What if I had a time machine and wanted to go to the beginning of time? when would that be? What time came before that? Something would have come before it. Something will always come before any point in time that you designate as the beginning.

Thanks for the question, you just made me realize it does exist backwards as well.

Answer 2

Time is something that is only relative to our little planet here. We look at the Earth going around the sun and say that time has passes. But to a traveler traveling at a different velocity, the appearant passage of time is different. The idea of eternity past though is hard to comprehend because we live by cause and effect and when you start thinking about what caused the beginning of the universe you start thinking about what caused the cause that caused the beginning, and so on and so on ad infinitum.

Answer 3

Time doesn't "flow" at all! There is no such thing as time except as a human concept required to separate events into past, present, and future. There is no such thing as time, as in "absolute time" where some Master Cosmic Clock ticks away the correct time for all the universe.

If you travel away from Earth at some velocity close to the speed of light and can somehow keep track of the passage of "time" back on Earth, you'd see clocks moving faster. If someone on Earth could keep track of the passage of "time" on your spaceship they'd see "time" moving slower. Which observer is right? Neither and both are right because there is no Cosmic Master Clock they can use as validation.

Answer 4

When you look up at the sky, you are looking at the past. Light has a finite speed of 3 x 10^8 m/s. Scientists came up with the light-year unit a long time ago. 1 light year is the time light travels in one year. Our galaxy alone is thousands of light years across. Looking at the stars, most are thousands of light years away. Light took so many years to reach earth, and be seen by us, which means, we are looking back in time, seeing the stars as they were x amount of years ago.

Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach earth, therefore, you are looking at the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. You have gone back in time.

We are 1.49x10^11 meters from the sun. Light travels at 3 x 10^8 m/s. Divide them, and you get 496 seconds, which is 8.3 minutes.

Answer 5

I happen to agree with you, or perhaps time is a loop as we believe space to be. I really wonder why people cannot conceive of time existing eternally to the past as well as to the future.