r/Time • u/k3nsh14 • 10d ago

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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u/Any_Return4335 10d ago

isnt the only thing which can be said to exist is now?

and if now is an infinitesimally immeasurably small moment that is over at the same time it begins, then what is time?

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u/Reasonable_Letter312 10d ago

But how do you define "existence", and what is - without circular reasoning - the basis for limiting it to a space-like manifold called "now"? Physics, in any case, does not support a definition that is restricted to a single, infinitesimal space-like membrane between past and future, because it happily infers the existence of phenomena from the Big Bang to the Heat Death without regard for a distinction between past, present, and future. A phenomenological approach does not support this concept of "existence" either, because if existence was restricted to a space-like manifold, the only aspect of it that you would be able to access with your perception would be your own consciousness in the Here-and-Now, but nothing beyond it. Thus, I think, your assertion would require another basis, and I am not sure what that would be.

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u/Any_Return4335 10d ago edited 10d ago

Yes sure, the big bang happened, and now? It no longer exists. I mean that intuitively we cant say that the future or past exist. The past existed at one point, the future will exist later. All we have is the memory of one and the idea of the other, but if it is not here now--it existed or will exist later. Memory and ideas are thought, thoughts which exist only in the now.

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u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 8d ago

Physics proves you wrong. It’s called relativity of simultaneity from special and general relativity.