We treat time as the fourth dimension and divide it into three categories; (Past, Present, and Future) and then cut it into many pieces we call durations; Attoseconds, Seconds, Days, Hours, Light Years, (and many more), and use these as units of comparison to measure movement, to order events, to control our technology and much of our lives. We treat time as a real thing, something we can save, use, and spend. In a practical sense, with our awareness focused on ourselves in everyday activities, this perspective makes sense, but our scientific investigations have created a very different view of time, one that goes well beyond the cyclical events of our planet spinning on it's axis as it circles the sun.
Our tools of discovery have become ever more sophisticated and as we look deeper into space and deeper into the structure of matter, time takes on new dimensions. Our macro discoveries have forced us to expand our durational units to cover periods many times larger than our practical units and our micro discoveries have forced us to chop our practical units of time into bits so small we need negative exponents to represent them. We have also discovered that time is not a universal constant but a variable and find this so disconcerting that we cling to old perspectives in many of the formulae we use to describe our new findings. The past now extends back beyond human history, more than 13 billion years to the beginning of the universe, and the forecast future extends forward in equally incomprehensible measure.
But what of the present? Is it also a variable? Is our "Now" different from "Now" in other places, and how wide is the present? How much time exists between the past and the future? As I type, I tap every key in the present but the last letter I typed is now in the past and the letter I am about to type is in the future. Is the present wide enough to encompass my entire typing session? Is it wider, or could it be much narrower? Our awareness is a survival adaptation of sensory organs and synaptic functions that allow us to sense conditions and activities around us and use our bodies, to react appropriately. Reflexes are built in for nearly instant reactions and instincts are genetically hard wired for reactions to more complex situations, but life has also developed the synaptic survival trick of recording events from past events and carrying these recordings into new present situations for use as needed. Living forms record bits of the past that are significant in a genetic library written in an amino acid alphabet of A, C, G,T, and an even more complex analog library written in electro chemical synaptic connections. The analog library collects data through sensory organs and when the brain is in a collection mode we perceive the activity as the present and when the brain is in a retrieval mode we perceive the activity as the past. We sense only a small part of the reality around us because of the limitations of our sensory organs just as we perceive time within the limits of our own synaptic functions. Our pace of awareness determines our perception of time including both the duration of the present and the division between the present and the past. But we have significantly augmented our sensory capabilities with technology and have used our technologically augmented synaptic capabilities to store more of the past and to explore more of the reality around us. We now know that the universe is exponentially more diverse and complex than we thought and are re-evaluating our concepts and perspectives to accommodate our growing augmented synaptic library. But some old perspectives are difficult to abandon, especially our concept of time as a real thing, a fourth dimension.
Leading us to our new perspectives has been a series of experiments and discoveries. When light is shined on a metal the metal emits electrons and we discovered that the intensity of light doesn't affect the results, but when we altered the wavelength and the frequency of light we concluded that when the wavelength of light is increased the frequency decreases and vice versa. When one increases the other decreases an equal amount leading us to a constant. When wavelength and frequency are multiplied together we discovered a constant of: (3.0 x 10 to the 8th power meters per second). (this constant also happens to be the speed of light in a vacuum). We also discovered that an atom energized by light accepts the energy and subsequently gives it back in packaged amounts, which led us to postulate discrete electron orbital energy levels and eventually relativity, the uncertainty principle, plank limits, quantum theory and a theory joining all the basic forces of nature, (except gravity).
We have gone far beyond our survival adaptive uses of our senses, reflexes, instincts, and synaptic capacity and ventured into the basic secrets of our surroundings, exploring with extreme tools a universe of controlled chaos ruled by probability and as we search for its largest patterns in outer space we also search for its smallest units in inner space. After combining the gravitational constant, (G), the relativity constant, (c), and the quantum constant, (h) Max Plank arrived at a constant unit of length, the smallest of which, (one plank length) is the smallest distance a photon of light can travel across at the speed of light in a vacuum. Anything smaller and the unit becomes dimensionless and our wavelength/frequency constant becomes an infinity that swallows the photon. Likewise a plank unit of time, (5.4 x 10 to the negative 44th power- seconds) is the smallest unit of time possible before physical laws fail and this limit is thought to have implications for quantum gravity, (yet to be reconciled with other forces) and has led to string theory, quantum loop theory and other extreme scientific reachings.
Without capital letter credentials behind my name I am free to think outside the box risking only amusement by those with a deeper understanding. I am forced to think outside the box because my lack of fluency in the language of mathematics, (spoken inside the box), does not allow me access. Free of any fear of being embarrassed or discredited by any peers, I offer the following.
(1) Matter motion and change don't require time any more than light requires a medium in which to travel. Changing relative positions conditions, temperatures or states, (be they the spin of a galaxy, the orbit of an electron, the death of a star or the joining of atoms to become molecules), require space and energy but not time. Time is an illusion created by an observer witnessing a record of motion and change that is recorded and carried into successive movements in quantum pulses which occur much to quickly to be observed.
(3) The Universe exists only as a succession of plank units. A strobe lighted reality with a flicker rate far above our ability to observe.
(4) Quantum uncertainty and action at a distance are the result of distortions as a jump to the next plank unit is made.
(5) Information is passed from successive plank units to the next in unique arrangements of discrete packets describing energy, matter, congregations of matter, relative positions and relative motion Slight transposition errors occasionally cause information to fragment and recombine in a hierarchy of evolving complexity that describes the motions and combinations of energy and matter that has evolved into the reality we now perceive.
Our persistent use of the term (t), (time), in descriptive formulae we use to guide our experiments and discovery efforts may be misleading, even when it is not explicit, (as in the speed of light) (d/t). Replacing (t) with comparatives complicate our formulae but may lead us closer to not only reconciling gravity with t,he weak and strong forces, but also in reconciling Newtonian physics with Relativity and Quantum effects.
I will let someone else do the math.
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