Does Time Actually Exist? Or is it all Relative?

Time is our constant companion, a slow dragging suitcase that we take with us everywhere, and affects everything in which we participate. Whether we like to admit it, one day, time will stop for us, but definitely not for everyone else. This in itself is a matter of philosophical debate. But what happens when the following comes into play;

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100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

Ferenc Krausz, working in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Using ultraviolet laser pulses, he tracks the brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms; these events last for about 100 attoseconds, or conversely 100 quintillionths of a second. But even Krausz’s work is nowhere near the frontier of time. Attoseconds are nothing when compared to the temporal realm known as the Planck scale. This scale marks the edge of what is our known physics, where distances and intervals are so short; our very concept of time is unable to feasibly describe what is going on. Time as we know it, is nonexistent. Planck time - the smallest unit of time that has any meaning physically - is 10-43 seconds, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Thus, the basic problem caused by understanding Planck time is, simply put, that time may not exist at the base level of physical reality. “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.” Time began to become a scientific problem almost a century ago, when a man named Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity cancelled out the idea that time was a universal constant. For example, one of the most prominent conclusions of this was that the past, present and future were no longer an absolute thing. In addition, Einstein’s theory of general relativity began to conflict with quantum physics. But this was, though controversially, solved (given a value of ‘solved’) by the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, when they created the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation. However… “One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” And though no one has managed to reconcile these problems, the problems observed are by no means the only concerns being faced by those looking to the temporal. But without the proper understanding, I would only make a mockery of such problems if I were to continue this piece. More of what I’ve spoken about can be found at the blink below, in an article written by Tim Folger of DISCOVER. Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.