Okay, since man invented time keeping and the calendar, does time in fact pass?

Question:Or is it just an artificial method for measuring something that doesn't really exist?

That we age is a biological breaking down of our cells. It does not necessitate the existence of passing time.

I'm asking because somebody put the thought in my head and now I want to know what you think.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Or is it just an artificial method for measuring something that doesn't really exist?

That we age is a biological breaking down of our cells. It does not necessitate the existence of passing time.

I'm asking because somebody put the thought in my head and now I want to know what you think.

First, let's talk about what exists.

The future does not exist. The past does not exist. Nobody ever goes there, much less returns from such a journey. The only thing that exists is the EverNow.

Time, as we tend to think about it, is a way of measuring changes in the EverNow. We observe intrinsic rates of change and get days, half-lives, years, and frequencies. By comparing them to each other and chopping them into pieces we get other standardized units of change such as hours, minutes, seconds, fortnights, and so on.

Because of the nature of the universe, rates of change can themselves be changed. Things can be made to change comparatively slowly or quickly through effects such as time dilation. We colloquially refer to this is going through time faster or slower, but again this creates an inaccurate mental picture - there is no 'time' as a thing to go through.

Nor is time is a dimension like space because there are no 'other' times. You can plot it on a chart, if you like, because math itself has no physical reality (it, too, is a description rather than a thing-in-itself).

When we talk about the future and the past, we are talking about projections of the EverNow. They are things we imagine. And have no more substance. When we talk about the flow of time, we are referring to our experience that everything changes. But because of the language we use, people sometimes mistake our ways of depicting something real for reality itself.

Sad, really.

time definately exists
but is it a constant?
that's what i want to know!

Time passes and will continue to whether we measure it or not. The present is just a medium through which the furure becomes the past.

Time is just a concept. It does not really exist as a measurement of our existence.

Time isn't a thing, so it doesn't pass. It is just a concept of humans to keep track of particular instances that occur throughout lives.

Time does exist.

The biological breaking down of our cells happens over a period of _______. Instead of all at once, where we would not be living. It does too neccessitate the existance of passing time, otherwise we would not even exist.
Good question, but really think about it.

This is sort of the "if a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there, will there be any sound" type of question. The bad news is there's no real answer. Just opinions.
Just what is 'time'? A day on Mars is different from a day on the Earth. You have to have a reference point to for time to exist. We use the rotation of our planet.

Our concept of time is ours. Time exist in the seasons, the rotation of our planet , the sun and the phases of the moon. Aging is process of time that everything experiences. When I say everything I mean everything. The stars, our oceans, our mountains, plants animals, the entire universe ages. If forensic paleontologist can date our skeletons and date those who came before us then the passing of time in molecular cell degeneration of our cells does in fact exist. Geologist can date rocks.

Here is an after thought.Archeologist's, mineralogist, plus others use time to date history and events even before humans.

time keeping and calenders are tools. They do not measure themselves.

Time exists as surely as space exists. It is where we live, our matrix..

things definetly change, but is that time? i mean the concept of and how time is organized is completely man made

man invented time keeping and the calendar to keep pace with time.

all man did was find a way to track time! he did not invent time it self, just gave other man a way to "See" it!
when you can see it you can studie it and learn from it and create other things to help you understand it!

i think it exists the way many dimensions exist... because we deam it so... for a calculation something measurable a concept that we can prove but still conceptualized.

I mean time is as tangable as direction, colour, gravity or oxygen.

I mean what the hell is H2O anyway?... and how come it runs

i think the thing to grapple with is that things were here and things happened... man just went around naming them! for understanding... and it is that same need for understanding that lets us unravel the things we make and then make them up again... maybe the same of diffrently.

hmm...

Einstein figured out that time is relative to the speed that one is traveling relative to something else. The faster you go, the slower time "passes." Thus, if you could travel fast enough, time would not "pass" at all. Time is relative.

Timekeeping is simply a means of measuring something that's always happening, regardless of whether we are aware of it. It can't be detected other that by measurement - that's why it's referred to as a temporal dimension (aka the fourth dimension.) However, the only real time is now. The past doesn't actually exist - it's simply a memory. And the future doesn't exist, since it hasn't happened yet. In reality, the only time that can be said to exist is a continuing sequence of nows, each one ending as soon as it starts.

Time is the label we give for a concept.

How does it exist? By the defining properties it is conceived and confirmed via tests, experiments and predictions.

Does a concept exist? Yes, in the thoughts and minds contemplating it. On papers based on it, in the world of which it has effects because that's where it is discovered. The concept is a description, a model of that discovery, it is not the phenomenon itself. The confusion is that the concept is made apparent to us intellectually, but the phenomenon may not be as exact as scientists made it and there is no real way we could tell the fine details.

Does time past? Yes, we definitely feel the effect of it's passing with our bodies and also we could tell by observing objects in the world, otherwise it is completely invisible and untouchable to us because it does not have "physical" properties.

Time is more illusive than the four forces of the universe, we could only change the appearance of the concept in a very limited way. Via the control of the four forces, things could be speed-ed up or slowed down or even stopped.
-[ In my opinion, that is an illusion we have about time. ]

If it passes, could we stop it? Now we are getting to the bottom. We could smash the clock and the conception but not the phenomenon.
- [Again my opinion.]

As long as there is space for physical objects to be affected by time, time the concept works. Concept breaks down when things move at extreme high speed -- close to that of light in vacuum. Also, at the beginning of Big Bang -- space is constrained by gravity to a point and the whole universe is contained within it. There is no room for movement.

Does time still exist before Big Bang?

- [I believe so.]

But the scientists say they do not know because there was no universe yet -- ie. there is no record of what happened before Big Bang. This is true in the science sense as observations could only be made for the cosmos as it was created, not before.