Poetry and Short Stories

Time doesn't exist and here's why.

Time doesn't exist.

Let me start this off by stating a single fact:
Time doesn't exist.

Now let me attempt to clarify that statement in terms that the average person can
easily grasp.

The concept of time as some kind of thing that can be traveled through in different
directions does not exist.

I will now attempt to explain what I mean.

Time, for us humans living in the third dimension, is a measure of perceived change. It
is not a thing, but rather an understanding of what is happening around (and inside) us.

As an example of this, let us observe two individuals. I'll call them Joe and Sam. Joe
and Sam are identical twin brothers. They are so alike that even they can't tell
themselves apart.

We will put Joe and Sam into two identical rooms. The two rooms have absolutely nothing
in them except Joe or Sam. Their walls, their floors and their ceilings are all identical
shades of light gray. Both rooms have an identical light source, a single bulb in a light
fixture in the exact center of the ceiling. Neither room has a window.

We will wait until the clock on the wall says that the twins have been in their individual
rooms for exactly an hour and then at the exact same moment, we will open both of their
doors.

Then we will ask them how long they were in their rooms. Because Joe and Sam are so
identical, they will say exactly the same amount of time will have passed. Will they
say it has been an hour? Highly unlikely. The reason is because neither Joe, or Sam,
has any way to tell, outside of their own body, how much time is passing. All they have
is a guess. Since Joe and Sam had no outside means of being distracted, they would have
been much more aware of things for the entire hour unless, of course, they started
daydreaming. They would have both noticed their hearts beating, been aware of breathing,
noticed aches and pains in joints and muscles and most importantly, noticed just how bored
they were each becoming. If they started daydreaming to stave off the boredom, since they
are so identical, they would have started doing so at exactly the same time, and continued
for exactly as much time as the other.

Now we will put Joe and Sam back into those rooms, but we'll change the experiment. We will
give Joe a book. We'll make sure it's a book that he really likes. We will also give Sam
a book but we'll make sure it's a book that will bore him terribly. We'll instruct both of
them that they must read the book for the entire time they are in the room regardless
of whether they wish to or not.

Again, we will leave Joe and Sam in their rooms for exactly one hour and open their doors
at exactly the same time. This time, when we ask them how much time has passed, Sam will
tell us a much longer time has passed than Joe will. The reason for this is because Joe
was engrossed in his book. He noticed very little change in either himself or
things around him. Aches and pains in his joints might have gotten his attention once
in a while. It's doubtful he ever noticed his heart beat. He might have changed positions
a few times to become more comfortable but for the most part, his mind was absorbed by
the book he was reading. To his conscious mind, things changed very little and thus
very little time passed. He's quite likely to have felt only a few minutes, perhaps
at most an entire half hour, passed while he was reading.

Sam on the other hand would have been incredibly bored. That boredom would have accented
his perception of change. Not only would he have noticed every ache and pain in joints
as well as uncomfortableness from sitting or laying while reading, but his mind would have
started seeking out other things to notice, such as an itch perhaps, in order to distract
itself from the boring words it was being forced to read. For Sam, time would have dragged
on. He most likely will guess that at least an hour and a half passed, and might even
insist that two, three or even more hours went by.

This is why you might pick up a book to read for 'just a few minutes' before going to sleep,
then suddenly realize that it's been several hours. It's also why sitting in the doctor's
waiting room seems to take forever, even though it might be no more than fifteen minutes.

Time, as we know and use it, is simply a matter of our personally perceived change in the
world around, and inside, us.

This is also why we humans need something to tell us how much time has passed.

Assume we lived on a world that had no changing day or night. We'd have no natural way
of telling hours were going by but we'd still have clocks. Now assume something happened
to stop every clock, watch, hourglass and any other time measurement device from
functioning. How likely do you think it would be that anyone would be to work when
they were supposed to?

Now we move into the realm of Science Fiction and the well-used, and loved, idea of Time
Travel.

We inhabit a physical universe with distinct and unchangeable laws. One of those laws is
that everything changes, everything decays and we humans can not un-change things. Perhaps on
the quantum level where everything is pure energy, it might be normal for change to happen
in one direction, reverse suddenly and go the other way, but not in the physical realm which
we inhabit. Things change in only one direction...forward. Unfortunately for the idea of time
travel, that doesn't mean we have a succession of nearly identical copies of something
standing in a row of seconds, waiting for someone to move backward and observe them in
reverse. But for Sci-Fi time travel to work, that's exactly what we'd have to have.

To illustrate, think of a long hall. We'll paint small squares on the floor of that hall and
we'll call each of those squares 1 nanosecond of 'time'. One end of the hall way will be
labeled 1:00pm and the other will be labled 1:10pm. To move 'forward' we have to start at
the end labeled 1:00pm and walk toward the end labled 1:10pm. To move backward we do the
opposite.

Now we'll take a glass of water and place it in the first square at the end labled 1:00pm.
This is a glass of water that someone's going to drink from so at the end labled 1:10 pm we'll
place an identical copy of the glass. However that copy will be empty of water.

Now we'll make enough copies of the original glass to fill all the other squares between 1:00pm
1:10pm, but each of them will have just a little bit less water in it. We'll now place those
copies in each square, in sequence, so that as we move down the hallway from 1:00pm to 1:10 pm
and observe the level of water in the glass, we can see it go down until it is completely
empty.

In such a hallway, we can move backward and forward through time with ease. However the glass
itself is trapped. Each copy of the glass is aware of only it's own state. It is unable to
observe the state of the copy in any other square. For the glass, regardless of the square
it inhabits or which copy it is, its existence is absolute.

Now we'll give the glass a unique ability. The ability to retain knowledge of how it was in
previous squares. This is something we humans normally call memory. As we move along beside
the glass, to us it still appears as if it were an incredibly large number of copies, each
just slightly different than the others. To the glass however, it now perceives something
amazing. It knows it has water in it and each copy 'remembers' when it was just a little bit
fuller than it is now. The very last glass remembers the entire process of 'being drunk' and
probably is very unhappy about it.

The glass is still trapped however. It's impossible for any of the copies of the glass to
leave it's square, move to some other square and change what's going on. It might want to,
but it can't.

For the sci-fi idea of time travel to work, that's exactly what our existence would have
to be. We'd have to be an infinite number of copies, each copy 'remembering' what happened
to all the other copies previously. Thankfully that's not the case. As the nanoseconds
pass, we change. We do remember what everything was like in the previous nanosecond but
we no longer exist in it. Nothing does. Even on the quantum level nothing does. There is
only one copy of the glass and it doesn't move down a hallway, it just sits in one spot,
changing in one direction. There's never any possibility that a glass which had water in
it will do anything but remain empty, unless acted upon by someone putting more water
in it. The glass won't suddenly reverse and the water come back all by itself.

Interestingly, quantum experiments have shown that at the most basic level, the blips of
energy which make up the very base of our physical universe come into existence then
cease to exist with incredible speed. What that means is that nothing exists for more than
a brief instant. Essentially, it means that we're constantly being created and destroyed,
but so rapidly that we never notice. The law of continuity comes into play here. That law
sees to it that as the energy bits come into existence, they do so in such that everything
in the physical realm which is made up of them is almost exactly the same from one nanosecond
to the next. They don't all cease to exist at the same instant, they don't all come into
existence at the same instant either, so there's never any chance that anything in the
physical realm might wink out of existence for a moment. That would be disconcerting to
say the least, and probably deadly as well. Imagine your steering wheel vanishing for a
moment while you're speeding down the highway perhaps. Or the bridge under your car which
just happens to be passing over a fairly large body of water ceasing to exist for a moment.
Not fun.

As we move up from the bottom of the quantum realm into the physical, those blips of energy
come under other laws and create atoms. Atoms are acted upon by still other laws, and now
we move into the realm of high school physics. Atoms get together to make molecules. It's
well known and very provable that molecules, and the atoms which make them, are composed of
pure energy. But now there are other laws at work. Laws which allow pure energy to work
together in such a way as to give form, substance and existence to our physical universe. Thus
we have H2O... 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom making one important molecule. Get enough
of them together and suddenly we don't have anything that looks remotely like energy...we
have water.

However, the law of continuity isn't absolute, which is why everything changes as it continues
to be created and destroyed. Water molecules move apart over time and water 'evaporates'.
The more outside energy is added to the water, such as heat from the sun, the faster that
the molecules move apart and the water turns into what we call vapor. But on the quantum
level nothing's affected. The bits of energy that make up the atoms in those molecules aren't
bothered by the laws of the physical universe. They don't notice the additional energy
from the sun or anything else. They just go on coming into existence and going out of it,
regardless of what's happening at our level. That's why things can rot, be worn away, rust
and fall apart. We call that process of decay Entropy, and we constantly fight against it.

At the quantum level the constant creation and destruction of the very energies of which
we are made goes on billions, trillions, perhaps more, each second... but we never notice.
We don't need to, and we would be most unhappy if we did.

To return now to the discussion of time travel, since time is only a measure of
perceived change, rather than a 'substance' or 'realm' or 'thing' we 'travel through',
in order to 'travel back through time' we would have to gain the ability to un-change
things in some way. We would have to be able to operate on reality in such a manner
as to make everything change backward as we observed. But without that ability, we'd be
left with guess work.

Now it might become possible at some point in our advancing technology to create
a machine much like the Holodeck. A machine that created 'reality' so well that it
would be impossible for a participant to tell the holograms inside from actual objects.
And it might be possible at some point to work out the science of prediction so well that
most large events could be guessed with 99% accuracy. Someone inside the machine could
'travel forward' through time in that manner and 'experience' things with almost complete
confidence that the events would actually take place.

Also, it might become possible to piece enough of certain historical events together,
that the machine could be programmed to display a 90% to 99% accurate depiction. Some
one could travel 'back through time' in that manner in the same way.

Unfortunately however, a time travel device such as H. G. Wells imagined will never happen.
Why not? Because, again, time is a measure of perceived change. It might become possible
to create a machine on earth that would allow someone sitting in it to approach the speed
of light, thereby slowing down his personal change and allowing the world around him to
change much more rapidly. Eventually he could conceivably stop the machine and step out.
He would most definitely find himself on a world that he would consider 'the future'.
Sadly though, he couldn't return to the world that he would consider 'his present.'

Things that changed around him are changed and to return to his 'present', he would have
to some how 'un-change them'. His machine would now have to have the ability to move close
to the speed of light as well as effect reality itself, forcing it to reverse the changes
which had taken place. Those changes weren't just confined to earth either, but rather
happened throughout all of existence. His machine would have to have the ability to
make all of existence 'un-change'.

Perhaps, you say, he could just go faster than the speed of light and allow everything
to un-change that way. Even if he could, and current experiments suggest that anything
that is part of the physical plane which attempts to do this is not likely to survive,
that would still not allow him to 'move' forward or backward through time. Not in
the classic sci-fi sense at least. It would amount more to his becoming a god and being
able to control time, and reality, for everyone else. Somehow I don't think I want
to live where he does in that case.