• Question: what is time

    Asked by apples to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Time is an odd thing – it’s not conserved like energy, so you can’t go and get it back at some point! We don’t know if time is something that glides along smoothly, or whether it has specific, defined steps that it rapidly races through. Space isn’t conserved either…but time-space – the concept of the bridging of space and time is. Weird huh? I guess in our own existance, we take time as being the duration of how long something lasts.

    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      The time is 8.52pm. It’s friday night!

      Ok, really, time is elusive – to me, it’s the irreversible change of things which are happening. I don’t know why we have time but everything would be pretty boring without it!

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      Very deep 😀 You can think of it as a concept made up by man in a way, but it would exist if we hadnt labelled it either. Time is a measuring system, time is a quantity, time gives us days, nights, years and lives. Time is a fundamental part of the universe, time is the fourth dimension.

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      I’m sure very few people can confidently answer your question, but hell, i’ll give it a go.

      Time is built into the fabric of our reality and it appears to have only one direction. The different between the past and the future may be related to another fundamental rule of the Universe: that entropy always increases. Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. A tower of bricks has low entropy (i.e. it has only a few ways that it can be arranged), whereas a collapsed pile of bricks has much higher entropy (you can rearrange it and it will nearly be a pile of bricks).

      Things move from low to high entropy but not the other way around – even though it is not beyond the laws of physics that they could. It would be possible for the bricks to fall from the tower and randomly form another tower – but they won’t.

      It could be that what we perceive as time is do with the universe’s entropy always increasing. But here we begin to step toward philosophy. Time is a great one to think about – good question.

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