• Question: What do you believe is the concept of time? (E.g when did start?, will it ever end? How will we know? If time ever exists after the universe ends, does that mean there's a possibility of something else happening? Or will it just be a void of nothing where time exists but nothing ever changes? You can really blow your mind thinking about it!

    Asked by AnimalNerd to yoyehudi, Oli, Kerrianne, Ed on 9 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Well, I think you’ve blown my mind at least! I try not to have a concept of time deeper than roughly when in the day or night I am…
      In some ways I think time is a human construct – seconds, minutes and hours don’t really exist in nature (a minute would also make sense with 100 seconds, or an hour with 50 minutes). Things like days, months and years do relate to definite things in nature though, all about the movements of Earth, the Moon and the Sun in space. And although it may be a human construct, time definitely exists as a thing – stuff happens in an order, from first to most recent.
      But, now that you’ve got my brain fit to burst, is it even possible to ask *when* time started? Because to answer that question you’ve have to put a time on it, so time by definition started at the beginning of time – it couldn’t have started at any other point!
      See, look, you’ve melted my brain. Nice one, animalnerd 😉

    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      Good question! This is fun stuff to think about!

      In most of physics, time is kind of boring and is literally taken to be what a clock reads. In most of your equations and experiments, that’s what time is taken to be.

      However, there are more fun areas of physics where we go beyond this classical view! For a long time scientists though time was a set thing, that was the same for anyone, anywhere throughout the universe. However, when Einstein said that the speed of light was the speed limit of the universe, had to change. With Einstein’s theory of relativity we see that time changes from observer to observer. Time moves slower or faster depending on how fast you are travelling. This changed time from being this seperate ticking thing, to the concept of ‘spacetime’, where space and time are merged into the same thing. This changed the idea of time from a simple time line, to a ‘world line’, which you can read about on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line

      The beginning of time is also an interesting one, and currently we say that time itself began with the beginning of the Universe with the Big Bang theory (about 13.8 billion years ago).

      If you ever get a chance, please read ‘A brief history of time’ by Stephen Hawking. You will love it! I read it as a teenager, and even though there was a couple of things I didn’t quite understand then, it’s written very well and it was a fantastic read! Definitely very inspiring if these are the kinds of questions you have. I think you would like it 🙂

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