Does time have a beginning?

Question

People, I am not looking for plagiarism. I only look for sincere responses.

Answer 1

Yes

Answer 2

In a sense, yes. It had a beginning for you and for all other beings on earth.

True, it wasn't time that began, but still when a being is 'born' time begins to count for it as long as that being lives, right?

Even the objects in the Solar system had a beginning -- in regard to the macro objects they came into being once all their constituent parts had combined. In regard to these micro objects they also had a beginning when they first assembled from matter created by supernovae, right?

Did time itself have a beginning? It seems that there is an argument that we may experience time locally, and some localities around black holes experience it at near zero time -- that though, in my opinion is still time. Lack of time would be different -- that I do not believe in.

Perhaps my religious background is coloring my view, but even God who has no beginning and no end, who then may experience it differently than I can imagine still has created beings and objects that experience it serially.

This to me means that time is an integral part of the reality God inhabits. In his reality, it seems to have variable speed, maybe even no set direction except what God desires?

Answer 3

Good question, This could bring forth a number of answers. You could say that time started when we first were able to measure it. This in a sence would be correct becasue that is when we first new of time. However you could say that it was when the big bang occured, but again there could have been time before that. So really i think there was no begining to time there was just a begining to life.

Answer 4

Humans can understand and accept that time will not have an end, however, we seem to think it must have a beginning. We think time is linear. However, in our finite minds, we cannot comprehend that maybe time is represented by a circle--infinite. No beginning and no end, just going on forever. Or you could believe what Einstein and others have said, that all of time is happening at once, and that it is our mental perception that leads us to believe time has a flow.

Answer 5

Unfortunately, there is no 1 true answer. it depends on your belief.

Humans have put so much faith in science in its scientific theories (conditions start at t=0), that humans find it hard to explain the infinite.
Funny thing is, science itself can't put a fullstop on which 1 of it's theories is true. why? because they're just theories.

My belief: Time has no beginning (not based on religion).

Hope this helps, Peace.

Answer 6

*Kant thought that time and space are attributed to and used by us to structure our experience. It was one of his 12 major categories of the understanding. My guess time began and mattered whenever humans became conscious beings and we became aware of and observed regularly repeated patterns of events like the rise and setting of the sun and other stars, regular seasonal changes in temperature and weather conditions, different but uniform life expectancies of different life forms, etc. We now have defined way to measure time based on a chosen number of vibrations of a radioactive Cesium 133 atom: namely,

" the Second (equal to)
The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom. The definition was added to the International System (SI) of units in 1967."

Another measure of time relartive to the stars is

"Sidereal time
An astronomical time scale that is based on the Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars. Thus a sidereal day is the time interval during which the Earth completes one rotation on its axis and some chosen star appears to transit twice consecutively on the observer's local meridian. Because the Earth moves in its orbit about the Sun, a mean solar day is about 4 minutes longer than a sidereal day. Thus, a given star appears to rise 4 minutes earlier each night, relative to solar time, and different stars are visible at different times of the year."

source :http://tf.nist.gov/general/enc-s.htm

For more info on the history of time see: http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/time.html

For info on Kant on Time see : http://www.dianahsieh.com/docs/kot.pdf

Answer 7

Time is an arbitrary and man-made measurements system. We further compound the problem by associating it with space.

Answer 8

Time is a bookmark in the pages of eternity.

Answer 9

Yes, it began about 14 billion years ago.