Wednesday 30 October 2013

Why Time Exists

It's quite common to come across science articles which argue that there isn't really any such thing as time.  This is a strange thing to say, if only because time is central Einstein's theories of Relativity.   It may be that time need not be present in Quantum Mechanics, but there is no evidence that QM is the central theory of physics.

However, there is a more everyday reason to believe that time exists, and that is that we have a word for an experience that we call time!  There is a thing that we use to label certain experiences of reality.  When a clock ticks, we refer to the duration between the ticks as the passage of time.  That duration is the cause of our use of the word 'time'.  

Time probably doesn't operate the way we think it does.  For example, it's not easy to understand what 'the flow of time' actually means.  But that doesn't mean that time itself doesn't exist.  Don't let the physicists try and persuade you otherwise!


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