When and how did TIME start?? Plz explain.?

Question

This question has been haunting me since childhood. I don't expect u people to give the correct answer or explanation to me but still let me see.

From our school studies we have studied that this universe came as a result of the 'big bang' of a dense spherical ball. Before that something might have happened and i don't care about that. What i want to know is that when did all these physical activities start taking place. There was no one no god or someone who said " Go! the time starts now" and suddenly everything came into existence. No. But there must have been some kind of start. Did u get to the depth of my question?? Plz give scientific explanations.

I wonder i have never found anybody wondering about this puzzle. But may be some Einstein has already given an explanation to this. If so plz let me know.

Plz read the full question. People are answering without going through the whole question and giving totally irrelevent answers.



so disgusting

Answer 1

well, first you have to wind it up! lol, just kidding. according to Steven Hawking, the big bang started as an infinitesimal point in which there was no space/time/matter. an instant later there was space/time/matter. in his calculations of the singularity in black holes, all physical laws "break down", and time ceases to exist.

Answer 2

Basically, the passage of time has always existed, time is only there because we measure it. And with those measurements we say that our universe has been in existence for 13,5 billion years.

Scientists cannot "see" further back than the Big Bang, so the laws of physics only start being applicable from the Big Bang till the present. So even though time may have existed before that moment, it will never be possible for us to measure it.

When I say that scientists "see" back to the Big Bang, I mean this:- Scientists have measured that the universe is constantly expanding in all directions at the same velocity. Now this expansion obviously cannot have been happening forever, it had to have started at a "point". But scientists call this a singularity, because there is no "point" that can be measured. They can only look back to a fraction of a second AFTER the Big Bang, but not even a fraction of a second before.

This is why we will never know what caused the Big Bang, because we don't know what was there before it happened.

Now there is a theory that all the matter in the universe will one day stop expanding, and will start contracting. This theory postulates that the universe as we know it will end in a Big Crunch. A time when all matter is compressed back into that singularity. Then, some time in the future, another Big Bang will take place. They theorise that this is a cycle that might have been repeating itself for eternity. Of course this is one theory that is impossible to prove.

If you feel like reading more go to http://en.wikipedia.org and do searches on your relevant search terms.

Answer 3

I am a religious guy who is very scientific indeed since I am an engineer. Your puzzlement is the same thing i went thru when things did not make sense.

As you know, Big Bang is still a Theory based on the observance of the space expansion in accordance with the Robertson-Walker model of General Relativity. There were talks that was postulated that they can pinpoint what happened milliseconds after the "big bang".

Lab testings have produced something close to Single cell beings with the induction of high voltage and with carbon based "stuff" that not many know the exact composition of. I do not believe that there was a lightning in the air that struck the ground and that the single cell beings were formed from them with the interaction of different elements in the earth and then evolution occurred and lead to the modern man with some hugs gaps in the so called, evolution line.

Since the "theory" is far fetched, i refuse to come in terms with it. Thus I believe in my holy book and believe in what my faith is.

Answer 4

According to some of the latest scientific theories, time began with the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking has commented that statements about what happened "before" time began are self-contradictory, and thus without meaning. Other theorists have contended that even if there were another time frame "before" the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us. Scientists have come to some agreement on descriptions of events that happened 10^(−35) seconds after the Big Bang, but generally agree that descriptions about what happened before one Planck time after the Big Bang will likely remain pure speculations.

Answer 5

Some people and most of string theorists wonder about time, time is one of the apparently 11 dimensions of space-time continuum (our universe see m-theory).
After the big bang the dimensions were created, we can see four of them x, y, z and time and we can move willingly in three x, y, z.
Time is different form the others we move steadily forward in one direction and can not change this pace.
Like a spot light moving thru a road in a dark night, we can see where the light is, remember the places where the light was and wonder what is to come. Still the road exists whole but the light lets you see only part of it.
See http://physics.usc.edu/~bars/twoTph.htm for a curious conception of two time dimensions.
Have fun! Much is in front of you when you open your eyes and step out of the cavern.

Answer 6

Let me take a guess. People existing at the time when human life came to existence must be more worried about how they would survive the next day(by 'day' they could mean next sunrise or next sunset) without food, clothing, shelter etc. When man found solution to his primary needs he must have felt the urge to go beyond them. He must have been inquisitive about his surroundings. Search must have lead him to new discoveries and invention. And thus the need of 'Time' would have felt. Every system would have defined 'time' from their own understanding about time. That must have lead to different eras. Eg:- Our Saka era. By 4 A.D people must have made many trials and errors to finally come up with exact structure of time and its repititiveness at regular intervals. Lot more thinking must have gone before people accepted Gregorian calendar worldwide and deemed it to be the best. When someone refers to something having an origin in '300 B.C' or '1000 yrs B.C' it doesn't necessarily mean that people started recording time from that time. It only means that we can record what must have happened in a particular era where time wasn't even recorded! Say for eg if I say that today is 8th February 2007 B.C how would I know that after 2007 years someone called "Jesus Christ" would take birth! Or suppose somewhere in tommorrow we accept some 'Tregorian calendar', how would answer our future generations as to, when 'Tregorian calendar' started, or till what time Gregorian calendar existed!

Answer 7

Let us generate discussion on Time:

For defining any physical entity (say time), one has to define its “origin” i.e. {(0,0) coordinate}, its “positive or negative arrow or direction” and possibly its “present value”.

In fact, we do not have answers to the origin of time because the exact nature of “energy & mass scenario" is still being investigated by Stephen Hawking, et. al. through modeling of black holes to ascertain whether any mass existed, amongst all-radiation energy just prior to the big bang. This will determine an upper limit to most-disordered state, which could have resulted in the big bang.

But, Stephen Hawking himself in his “brief history of time” has defined that we cannot tell as to how time started, but we can define the “Positive Arrow of Time”. He reasoned that during every conversion amongst energies, and into masses as well, the entropy of this universe is continually increasing. Because, for every useful work derived here, the available sources of energy are being degraded – energy running down the hill, because some energy is added to the universe as heat (useful work=boiled potatoes but wastage–hot water thrown in sink or is lost for the pair of energy used and useful work obtained. This is increasing the entropy (disorder) of the universe.

Thus the positive direction (arrow) of time is that direction in which the entropy of the universe in increasing.

If it is considered that, just prior to the big bang, we had all Energy (Extremely high temperature) and no Mass, then it is reasonable to consider that this E was the “perfectly or most graded” or “energy had only one dimension that is “radiation” (unlike present 7 types of convertible energies) – not that their theoretical chances of manifestation into other types of energy were ZERO, but there was no agent or surface or material that could not only have facilitated conversion, but also sustained it. See the catch point here, which Hawking was bothering himself with:

As regards the term “NOT sustained it”, means E > mc^2 (half electron + half positron) > E was happening but not crystallizing into mass. Happening qualifies that disorder was still being upped > > upped > in dots of time that was elapsing. Half + Half theory (reversibility) thus gives way to non-reversible (quarter electron + 3-quarter positron) assumption. Even non-reversibility will give way to semi-classical theory.

Many minds have been stretched by these inequalities beyond their elastic limits.

Answer 8

Asking about times earlier than the Big Bang is like asking about places further south than the South Pole.

Latitude (or is it longitude?) starts at the South Pole, and time started at the Big Bang.

The comment about the South Pole wouldn't make any sense if the Earth were flat rather than curved; there wouldn't be a South Pole. Similarly, the fact of a Big Bang automatically tells us that space-time is curved rather than "flat" as well. (Although the terms can confusingly be used in other ways too that seem to contradict that point.)

Answer 9

Time was created in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, making it the first weekly news magazine in the United States. The two had previously worked together as chairman and managing editor of the Yale Daily News. Hadden was a rather carefree figure, who liked to tease Luce and saw Time as something important but also fun. That accounts for its tone, which many people still criticize as too light for serious news and more suited to its heavy coverage of celebrities (including politicians), the entertainment industry, and pop culture. It set out to tell the news through people, and for many decades the magazine's cover was of a single person. The first issue of Time was published on March 3, 1923, featuring on its cover Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. People was originally inspired by Time's People page.

On Hadden's death in 1929, Luce became the dominant man at Time and a major figure in the history of 20th-century media.

Answer 10

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html

This looks pretty much what I think is true - its a nice summary too of the different scientific ways of estimating.
It places the age of the universe at 13.7 GigaYears or 13.7 Billion years, or 13700000000 years.

Time, on the other hand, as Einstein said, "is something you measure with a clock" - time really started when people started measuring it; its based entirely on dividing our lives into manageable chunks. If we lived to a much greater age, or had a different number of fingers we would measure it totally differently (ever tried telling the time in binary?).