Here, I am talking about the concept of ‘time’.  Scientists tend to treat the concept of time (hereafter just referred to as ‘time’) as a thing that naturally exists, like gravity or magnetism.  They talk about time as a thing that can be explored or traveled through (more on that later).  I think they are wrong.

First off, let me say that I am not a scientist, not in the classic sense with the letters and papers and all the normal trappings of academia that we (and mostly they) equate as the prerequisites of being able to use the label.  But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about things.

So, time…what is it if it does not exist?  It is nothing.  Time is a man-made invention that we use as a benchmark for our existence.  We use time as a tool to gauge almost everything we do.  We invented time for our purposes.  ‘Time’ is based on the spin and rotation of our planet.  ‘Days’ are represented as sunset to sunset.  Then these days are broken into consecutively smaller units to help us measure the smaller aspects of our daily existence.  ‘Years’ are represented by how long it takes our planet to go completely around our sun.  Days and Years don’t really line up, but that’s no big deal…we just ‘fudge’ the calculation with leap years and the occasional adjustment of the atomic clocks.  Yep…we made time, and we adjust it when we need to so it continues to fit our needs.  It is not a constant, it is not even a variable…it doesn’t actually exist at all.

If you went to Mars with your wrist watch on, you would find after a short while that your days and nights were all wrong.  That is because on Mars, ‘time’ is different.  A Martian day is about 40 ‘minutes’ longer than a day on earth.  So what do you do on Mars…do you change your clocks so that a day becomes 24 hours and 40 minutes?  Or, do you just stretch out the ‘hour’ so that it fits within our concept of the ‘24 hour day’?  Doesn’t matter…the point here is that ‘time’ is just a concept we use to measure stuff.  It is not a constant, like gravity and magnetism, because it doesn’t really exist in the universe.  If it did, it would be a constant, too

Our concept of ‘time’ is based entirely on a starting point and an ending point.  Hours, minutes, days, decades, doesn’t matter…they are all based on a starting moment and an ending moment.  But, we live in an infinite universe, without a start and an end.  The universe (or the void of space, whatever you want to call the big black void where we live) has always been, and will always be.  How can there be ‘time’ in a place with no start and no stop?  If we base our concept of ‘time’ on when an event started and when it stopped, then logically the black void of space would have a starting point from which all time would have begun.  But, as best we can tell, it does not.  So, by default, without a starting point, we can’t have ‘time’.

‘Time’ is a one dimensional concept in a three dimensional universe.  We cannot comprehend a universe without time so we don’t try…our brains are not equipped to comprehend such a complex concept as a place where no time exists, leading to the inevitable question, “if there is no ‘time’, then what do we call our existance?”  Don’t ask me.  I can’t comprehend it either.  But, unlike our classically trained scientists and physicists, I don’t try to lean on the simple contrived concept of ‘time’ as a crutch, trying to force-fit everything we know into that concept.  Because it doesn’t exist.  Everything we are, everything we know, everything that is and always was and will ever be, just exists, not as a simple sequential, one dimensional flow of events but as a big glob of existance.  We just exist.  And we invented ‘time’ to help us explain and measure that existance.