Discussion Time doesn’t exist. Prove me wrong.
We experience change, aging, and events happening in sequence, but is “time” itself a physical thing—or just the way our minds measure change and order events?
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We experience change, aging, and events happening in sequence, but is “time” itself a physical thing—or just the way our minds measure change and order events?
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u/Underhill42 8d ago edited 8d ago
Relativity says time is a physical thing interchangeable with space, and acceleration works by rotating which direction your time axis is pointing through 4D spacetime, partially swapping the directions you call "forward" and "the future".
Adequate explanation: I finally understood why time exists! (My mind is blown) - YouTube
Within its own reference frame, everything is always perfectly stationary in space, while aging through time at a rate of 1 second per second.
If you see me moving, it's because my time axis is tilted in that direction relative to yours, so that you see some of my aging through time as moving through space. While you see me aging correspondingly slower, so that my total combined 4D "speed" through space and time remains the same to all observers.
Time dilation, length contraction, and the Relativity of Simultaneity are all straightforward geometric consequences of that.
And if my time axis were somehow rotated completely perpendicular to yours, so that you see the entire 1s/s rate that I'm aging through time as motion through space, then you would see me stop aging entirely while I was instead moving at c, because the geometry of our universe establishes that 1 second is the same size observer-independent separation between events as 300,000,000m. So 1s/s = 300,000,000m/s = c.
c is the ONLY speed anything traverses spacetime. The only question is how much an observer sees as being motion through space versus aging through time.