The Nature of Time

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TIME

By John K Daly

 

Why is the future not knowable in the way the past is knowable? Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Why is there an arrow of time? What is time? These seem like difficult questions, but they are not. There is a simple path to an accurate understanding of their answers.

 

To begin to understand these questions, consider the expansion of an inflating balloon. Its surface is expanding such that if you pick any point on the balloon, every other point on the balloon recedes from the point you picked. If you think about how this works everywhere on the balloon, you realize that what is really happening is that new area is flowing in the balloon's surface as it expands. At every single point on the balloon's two dimensional surface, new length and new width are appearing, and spreading in all directions.

 

Area is two dimensional and space-time is four dimensional, but the same kind of thing is happening in our Universe, and by Universe, I mean the visible portion of the universe we inhabit, not the totality, which may be infinite. The Universe we can see, (which I will designate with a capital U) is expanding. The mass the Universe contains is composed of matter and energy. They are inter-convertible (e=mc squared) and both have mass. The mass the Universe contains is not increasing. Since the Big Bang, the mass has been constant. It is a lot cooler now than the incredibly hot Quark-Gluon mix it started as. It cooled to become mostly hydrogen and then fused to heavier elements in stars and captured neutrons etc. to become the large array of elements we see today, but it's all still the original mass we started with, just a lot cooler, and a lot more complex. The original simple Quark-Gluon mix has developed to become the diversity of all the elements in the periodic table. The Universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years. It expands this second, at a rate which is still homogeneous everywhere in the Universe.

 

The space-time that contains this mass is growing ever larger, but no new mass is appearing. Only new space-time is appearing. Space-time is not at all material, no more than up and down, or left and right are material. It is a set of 4 continuous dimensions, 4 directional axes if you will, left/right, up/down, forward/backward, future/past; all continuous and at right angles to each other. Continuous interchangeable dimensions at right angles to each other are called a continuum because they are the same. The only difference is the way we are pointed. If we turn 90 degrees, the front/rear dimension becomes the left/right dimension. The three dimensions of space are only arbitrarily designated. In actuality, all four dimensions are the same, but we do not perceive time as a space dimension. Einstein has proved it to be a dimension of the same continuum, and many experiments have confirmed this. But our perceptions see time as a flow.

 

Because all of its parts grow at the same rate, second by second, the Universe is flat. The space-time expansion rate has changed, in fact, it was explosively larger in the beginning, but what ever that rate happens to be at any particular second, it is identical across the Universe, and the Universe stays flat. It expands uniformly.

 

Consider, that, most importantly, not just space is flowing in the expansion. Time is flowing also. New space and time flow in our Universe just like new width and length flow in the balloon's surface. We understand the creation of new space in an expanding Universe. The Universe is getting bigger, adding space, growing outward from every point. But the creation of new time, we experience personally. New time flows everywhere as it appears in the expansion of space-time, but living things perceive this flow directly, as the passage of time. Only our instruments can detect the flow of space. The difficulty of understanding Cosmology is not the science, but how we perceive time.

 

In the expansion, in the passage of additional time, change becomes possible. If time did not increase in the Universe, nothing in the Universe could change. Time's expansion ages the Universe, equally, everywhere. The expansion of time which has not yet taken place is the future. Think about it. The flow of space must also be the flow of time, because if time did not flow, there could be no change. Without the flow of time, the Universe could not have expanded or changed in any way. It could not even have originated. Without the flow of time, there is no flow of space. They are and must be, a continuum.

 

Some Cosmologist believe that time has no boundaries, and flowed before the Big Bang. And yes, the rate of expansion of space with respect to time has varied, but the question of time's origin is moot for this essay, which stands or falls, whether time preexisted the Big Bang or not, because the origin of time makes no difference to its flow, or to our subjective experience of its flow.

 

Space-time expansion does not, and has not changed the size of bound structures. The structure of an individual atom is due to its component particles and the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic forces. The space the atom occupies, continually expands and flows outward, but the atom's structure, its particles and the forces which hold the particles in place, that structure does not change. Expansion does not change the size or mass of individual atoms. The same is true of other larger structures composed of atoms, which are bound by Chemical, Electromagnetic or Gravitational forces. Gases, dust, asteroids, planets, suns, galaxies, galaxy clusters, none of them are changed in size by the expansion of space-time. The space they are embedded in expands and flows frictionlessly past and through them as it expands, leaving them intact, but ever increasing the distance between bound clumps of matter.

 

Space and time, no matter how differently we perceive them, are like length and width, a set of dimensions in a continuum. But the space-time continuum encloses our entire Universe. It is the continuum whose growth, whose endless supply, directed by the laws of our Universe, has developed the original matter of our Universe from the beginning. The continuous supply of space-time has allowed change and development of that matter. It has allowed it to produce life, evolution, and even thought. The flow of space-time is not a remote, esoteric abstraction. In summary:

 

The Universe has been shaped by its own laws from the beginning. These laws, which also originated in the Big Bang, developed the original mass from a uniform hot mixture to an extensive and diverse array of elements. They developed that diverse array of elements to a diverse array of life, and then developed that diverse array of life to a diverse array of intelligence. Eons of complex, multistage development, and growing diversity, were made possible through one process, the process which formed our Universe, the process which developed it:

 

The expansion of the space-time continuum.

 

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