What is time - by T. Barzuck - Quora Question Review

This document contains a review of the answer by Jonathan Devor on the question in Quora: "What is time"
To order to read all the answers select: https://www.quora.com/What-is-time-2

Contents

Reflection

1. Answer Review

Contrary to what most people assume, there is no secret of time. Although the details are not worked out yet, the broad explanation of what it is and how it works is already known.

The answer about the nature of time has to start with photons.

The concept of time has nothing to do with photons. What is done is to multiply a duration with the speed of light. That distance i.e. c*t is physical the distance that a photon has travelled in time t. And is also identified as the 4the dimension. The problem is the 4the dimension is neither chicken nor meet. Anyway it is not time.
They are events when minuscule pockets of energy move at the speed of light between their site of emission and absorption. Similarly, time consists of such events on multiple levels of the organization of matter. What we consider solid structures made of matter are also events. This is because they are made of similar pockets of energy of matter. Quadrillions of times each second, they interact with the Higgs field, but between these interactions for very short time and space, they are like ephemeral photons and travel at the speed of light as this is the most fundamental speed at which everything propagates. This happens so fast that it makes them look like solid particles, and we are made of them too.
All the above is not clear.

The next issue about the nature of time that needs to be considered is that we are life forms. The complex arrangement of these particles from which we are made can only be maintained at the cost of energy from the outside, or we decay and fall apart, which causes death. The process that maintains our structure is called metabolism and takes place over time. It is very important because even though the Universe consists of events arranged in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, we cannot experience these events suspended, frozen as they might be fundamentally. Being alive and thinking about them are processes during which the Universe changes around us. Mental operations involve electrical action potentials traveling in our nerves over time too.

All the above is not clear

When the simplest, first forms of life came to be, they could only experience the present. Later, they evolved memory because it improved the efficiency of acquiring energy, which they needed for sustaining their structure. They evolved to remember where energy, which was food, got already depleted so that they wouldn’t need to go there again, or they remembered where energy could be found repeatedly. This characteristic of theirs, the memory became more complex in even more sophisticated forms of life, like humans. Our memory and brain can even anticipate the future with what it already knows, and it has a dedicated subsystem to create motion and sense from past events. It creates a narrative, a movie that we call our lives. It generates private sensation of the passage of time out of still events from which the Universe is made on multiple levels of organization of matter down to the simplest particles.

All the above is not clear. What is worse: It has nothing to do with the question: What is time

Finally, the particles might not be fundamental if Quantum Field Theory proves true because they might be excitations of even more fundamental fields.

And that’s all, folks.
No. That's not all.
This is the big and mysterious secret of time.
The answer, anyway, does not help you.
It wasn’t that complicated, wasn’t it? Understanding the nature of time is at the heart of understanding the nature of the Universe, life, and who we are.
Understanding the nature of the Universe, life, and who we are has nothing to do with understanding what time is. Time is much more that we humans experience that there exists a Universe, that there exists life and that we exist in time.

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3.

Reflection 1 - Question Review

The question of "What is time" is very difficult to answer.
For what ever the answer, time is not something.
What makes sense is to have two definitions of time: physical time and mathematical time.
Physical time is what we humans experience as time. What we experience is duration. We experience the present. We remember what has happened in the past and we can predict, with a certain certainty, what will happen in the future.
Physical time can not be measured. From a physical point of view, the time at any instant at present is everywhere the same.
Mathematical time is the physical time we read on a clock. Mathematical time also has it limitations, because a clock is also a physical process, with all its limitations. One of the major problems is that a clock should not be moved, because moving a clock will affect its physical behaviour.

Reflection 2 - On the origin of time with Thomas Herzog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWIsDU8Fcpg

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Created: 22 July 2023

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