what is time???

Question

how do we really know what time is, how do we really know what an hour is or even an day is? We cant measure time in our head, only with a clock. we depend on others to tell us the time, so how do we know that the people that tell us what the time is, is lying or not. Who set all the clocks in the first place. Do you get what i am saying?

Answer 1

Time in scientific terms is a dimension of space tied into 3D space, making spacetime. Our experience of time is how we and other matter move through this 4th dimension. This is why we see all the processes that happen as they do. We set clocks in the first place by the position of the sun in the sky.

Answer 2

A day is one rotation of the Earth on its axis. An hour is 1/24 of a day. A minute is 1/60 of an hour. A second is 1/60 of a minute. I can keep doing this till nanoseconds, but I won't. We know what day it is because people all over the world run on what's know as the Gregorian Calendar. Most societies have run on the Gregorian Calendar for the past 435 years (since about 1582). Also a year is considered one full orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which occurs after approximately 365.25 days.

We can measure time in our heads if we are smart enough to not use a calendar and count out every single day for one year. That is technically telling time. We can't measure precise time like seconds, nanoseconds, minutes, or hours as accurately though without a clock/watch. This is when we start using machines to measure the seconds and minutes and hours of each day. Calendars and clocks are just an easier way to measure time.

These units though; years, days, hours, minutes,seconds, are only used to measure time, they are not time itself. When someone says, "It's six thirty A.M. on Sunday, June 10th, in the year 2007," they are measuring time, not defining it. If you think people are lying to you when they tell you the time, you can only assume that in the society you live in, people do not lie when they tell you the time. If you ask a random person on the street what time it is, they would have no real reason to lie about the time of day, but you could always check for yourself if you are in a city by going in a store and looking at one of their clocks. If everyone lied to everyone about what time it was, then nobody would ever be able to function in society, and society would eventually breakdown.

So I guess a shorter answer to your question would be, time is how quickly or slowly things change/move. If something is moving, it is moving through time. There is no going back in time, only moving forward. You can not changed how something moved in the past, time we have already moved past, we can only change how things will move in the present (or the future which is how things will move at a certain point we have not yet come up to).

Remember that days, hours, years, etc., these are just ways of measuring time. Time is how things change. This is just how I feel, if you really are interested into deep thinking like this, I'd start looking into books on philosophy and stuff. Some discussions on time by modern day and old philosophers will really trip you out.

Answer 3

It's time to seperate the wheat from the chaff. Before the big bang there was neither time nor space, there was only the void. The energy that appeared at the big bang quickly condenced into matter, at that instant time and space came into being. Movement of matter creats intervals of time and eltromagnetic waves create space. There were no clocks, clocks have nothing to do with time, they were created by man to let him know when it was dinner time. Twelve clocks on the earth's surface spaced at 1000 mile intervals from east to west will show twelve different times, what does that tell you? Wedged in between the end of one event and the beginning of the next event is the shortest of intervals, that is time, it can also be called NOW. that is all there is, it is always, NOW. The end of the previous event was the latest chapter of history, everything that happened before that consists of memories or written records, there is nothing that can be visited by someone from the furure. The future cannot exist, it begins with the start of the next event, we can control the comming events to some extent by making wise decisions based on what was the result the past event, your future is in your own hands, make unwise decisions and you will pay the price. Let's deal with time travel, if some one in the future, if you believe there is a future that exists right now, then that surely means that you can never die, you must always be on hand to greet a traveller from that future.that is not the way things work, you will have to admit. A man in Australia hits his thumb with a hammer, at the same instant you swat a bug that has landed on your hand, in Australia it is Monday,in the USA it is Tuesday. Thats what man has done to time.

Answer 4

Time is one of the dimensions we use for measuring. But it is in no way fixed. For people living in Nairobi Kenya for example time runs slower. The higher up you go, the slower time runs. This was prov-en in a scientific experiment, by placing 2 clocks, 1 at the base, and 1 at the top of a water tower.

Answer 5

Time is what clocks measure.

Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

While space happens between events when they happen at the same time, time is what happens between events when they're in the same spot.

Unless it's a collision--then the two events happen at the same place and time.

Does that help?

Answer 6

Time is nothing more than a human creation to measure distances from one period in existence to the next. It has no physical characteristic, it is not an object.

Clocks are basically based on the suns position, at Noon the sun is directly overhead (wherever its noon), and we use the word noon to indicate exactly that. Its just for scheduling purposes (as its mandatory for any civilization that intends to be even remotely organized).

It is speculated that traveling at the speed of light will warp time, as time is tied to space itself (the time-space continuum, do more research on that and youll understand better).

Answer 7

yea i get what ur saying the time goes on the sun and stuff it started a long time ago..im not all that eduacated in this area but it had to do with something along time ago someone did jsut make it up from liek the caveman ages and then it got more advanced but doesnt it fit quiete well.....i really dont pay to much attention to time anyway..

Answer 8

things pass. Its because of motion. Ya but time for us is real time. Maybe like if someone was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years old then 100 years would be a snap
all in perspective

Answer 9

hell ya i get what ur saying...i always think about this too and i always annoy my family with that question...lol great minds think alike!!

Answer 10

A MEASURMENT