Tricky Keg Stands

Time Does Not Exist

I'm just going to throw this out here. Time does not exist. Time is considered one of the "fundamental quantities." That is, one of the units for physical quantities from which every other unit can be generated. That's great, but I feel that fact is over generalizing and leads to inaccuracies. Let's take a 45 second look at time and try to figure out if time really does exist.

Perhaps you're thinking, "Of course it exists, douche bag. After all, time is a physical quantity that can be measured and calculated. Like weight, it is just there. Stick a slab of meat on a scale and measure it. Click the stopwatch when the runner crosses the finish line. Look... 45 seconds, there's your time, dumb ass."

Right. You can measure it, but what is, "it?" Who's to say those 45 seconds are the same as 45 seconds measured by the same stop watch 5000 years from now at the bottom of the deepest ocean? It won't be. Let's say you have two identical, uberaccurate, atomic stopwatches. Start them both at the "exact" same time and throw one really hard so it goes outside the solar system and comes back (perhaps you'll need to tape it to a boomerang to get it to come back.) Stop them and have a look... they don't say the same thing. One is a little off. Don't believe me? Read some books.

It has been a while since I've read a book, but i seem to remember time is relative to speed and gravity... you go really fast, distance shrinks. You cruise by a planet and time gets warped. I may not have that right because that makes no sense.. how do you measure speed? with stop watches and yardsticks... How do you measure gravity? by timing how long the bowling ball takes to land on your toe. Hmm... it looks like everything is dependent on everything else and those measurements involve time.

My 45 seconds is about up, so this is how it is. Time is the ratio of one moving thing over another. It is just a unitless ratio. For example, we can express time by the number of times our heart beats between sunrises. Time is not constant because the ratio can easily get screwed up by outside forces. In the sunrise case it will get thrown off if a Liger jumps out from behind a tree... and, in the atomic clock case it's thrown off ever so slightly by gravity.

Here's my hand-wavy screwy point. The physics we see such as time, distance and energy is the macroscopic interactions between particles on a scale that is tiny beyond our imagination. These particles are moving and interacting in simplistic ways that when added together form our experience of the universe. When the atomicstopwatchboomerang gets tossed through the solar system it's tiny particles are reacting to all the tiny particles and summations of particles it is passing by and through. Therefore it's ratio (time) is affected differently than the stopwatch i'm holding in my sweaty hand in stl.

Time does not exist, but it is a convenient way to express the interactions of quadribiliojigillions of particles that are busy interacting on a too-small-to-comprehend scale. Lucky for us, math scales so someone should eventually be able to figure it out...

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