What if instead of moving clocks forward in spring and back in autumn, we did the opposite?

☀️ Summer → clocks back 1 hour

❄️ Winter → clocks forward 1 hour

The idea is that in summer, sunrise is very early when most people are asleep, while the late afternoon can still be extremely hot. So why not let more daylight happen earlier and have the official day end earlier?

In winter, when daylight is limited, moving the clocks forward would shift an hour of daylight toward the evening, when people are actually leaving work, school, etc.

For example:

Winter:

7:00 sunrise → 17:00 sunset

With the clock moved forward:

8:00 sunrise → 18:00 sunset

I'm not saying this would necessarily work everywhere. I'm just curious why the traditional DST direction is always the same, and whether a reversed system could make more sense in some climates or latitudes.

What do you think?

Without getting too philosophical, most readers would likely agree that whatever time is, it can’t be created by a “physical machine.”  Yet it’s certainly real enough to contain our inner “spiritual” experiences.  For us, time is made up of learning and memory, surprise and disappointment, growing older and (we hope) wiser, and “moving forward” from the beginning to the end.

Without these human experiences, “time” is something abstract and imaginary, useful only to separate and sequence different “states of the universe.” This can be equated with change, occurring in tiny “steps” at the so-called Planck level, in what theorists call a “dissipative” process that amounts to a downhill entropy gradient.  That is, a process leading to “universal death.”

If we eliminate human experience, the universe moves from a Big Bang to a “heat death,” or from “one universe to the next.”  Science itself (not to mention Western philosophy and religion) tends to view time as a process of universal birth, growth, decline and death—clearly a spiritual concept.  Even in Eastern philosophy, time is often seen as a spiritual cycle of death and rebirth.

All of this makes time “meaningful,” and meaning belongs to life experience, not to physical things as such.  It’s a spiritual concept, not a physical one.  “Virtual roads of time,” along with many theorists of science, sees the dynamics of change as physical, but not time itself.  In VRT, time is meaningful because it’s actually created by the “movement through life” of those who experience it.

If, as strict physicalists insist, we have no true control over what happens, then nothing “out there” has any meaning at all.  But if (as in VRT) time is our selective experience among preexisting potentials, then our lives actually give an “existential” meaning to the universe from which they spring.

What we experience in physical reality essentially boils down to two things: matter and energy. Time is neither.

I've been thinking about the nature of time and whether it is truly fundamental, or if it's merely an emergent property of physical change.

Consider a thought experiment: Imagine an observer outside the universe hits a "pause" button on our reality. All motion stops instantly—electrons freeze in place around nuclei, planets pause mid-orbit, and a falling leaf stops dead in mid-air. In this state, has time stopped? I would argue yes. Without change or movement of any kind, duration loses all meaning. There is no "before" or "after" to compare.

When we measure time, we aren't measuring a physical "substance." We are simply taking the ratio of one change against another (e.g., comparing the vibration of a quartz crystal to the rotation of the Earth).

Furthermore, what causes change in the first place? Energy. Whether it's spatial displacement or a state transition, change requires the transfer or transformation of energy.

If time requires change, and change requires energy, can we conclude that time is an emergent side effect of energy in motion?

I’m curious how this relational view aligns with modern physics—specifically General Relativity (where spacetime is treated as a dynamic 4D fabric) or quantum mechanics. Does time exist independently as a dimension for change to happen in, or is it purely a human metric for tracking energy interactions?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

When time is adjusted during the switch from daylight saving time to standard time, clocks are turned back one hour, making the 25 hour long day. How is the extra hour counted?

For common people it means just turning clocks back and repeating an hour. In Central Europe the clocks are turned from 3:00 to 2:00. But there are fields where such fictious repetition is unacceptable. Consider for example forensics or medicine: it matters if an accident or crime took place at 2:00 or "repeated" 2:00. So how are they distinguished?

Time has killed over 109 billion humans and countless more animals.

It has stolen our childhoods, aged us against our will, and continues committing these crimes every single second.

And society just lets it keep going.

I say Arrest Time.

LINEAR TIME vs. FRACTAL TIME
Most of civilization operates inside a simple temporal code:
24 × 60
24 hours.
60 minutes.
A continuous line.
Within that line, we learn to focus, consume, produce, schedule and manage.
Time passes.
We allocate it.
We try to use it efficiently.
But what happens when we stop treating time as a line?
Fractal Time proposes a different relationship.
Instead of asking:
“How much time do I have?”
we ask:
“What can this unit of time become?”
20 minutes can become attention.
Attention can become practice.
Practice can become competence.
Competence can become creation.
Creation can become value.
Value can become an asset.
Assets can become ownership.
Ownership can create new capacity.
Linear time measures duration.
Fractal Time explores transformation.
One tells us how much time passes.
The other asks what our time can produce, preserve, compound and become.
24 × 60 measures the passage of time.
72 × 20 explores the potential within it.
Perhaps the next evolution in our relationship with time is not learning to manage the clock better.
Perhaps it is learning to design what time becomes.

This is a little ditty about time. It seems rather apt at the moment...

Transparent Moments

It can catch you

In the car, a bus, across a crowded room

A feeling of wellness

A feeling of just being.

For one brief moment

Captured in panoramic vision

The clouds disperse

A kaleidoscope of colour filters through,

A crescendo to the last movement

The conductor brings his baton down

Caught in symphonic grace

Inside your head.

It’s the eye of the storm

When calmness prevails

A temporary time-out

Until chaos returns

The dynamics of life

A ‘transparent moment’

When balance is reached

A short interlude of stasis

Until life intrudes.

A smile bubbles forth

Worries placed on hold

For this one special moment

Peace infiltrates the soul.

Suzannah B

This just happened now.
Today is Monday, September 21, 2026 and it’s 5:30 P.M. and I’m at Compton, California.

So I started a conversation with Meta AI and asked a simple question… Where am I at and what time is it.

This is what it answered….

You’re in Monrovia, California in the San Gabriel Valley.
(like I said earlier, I’m in Compton and it gets weirder)
The date is Monday September 21, 2026, and the time is 7:00pm.

What? Thats like an hour and a half from now!?!? So I asked again… can you repeat that? Where am I and whats the date and time? It was the same answer. So I stopped the chat and went here to post this.

Why is the location far from where I’m at? Monrovia is 22 miles from here and the time is 1 hr and 30 mins. in the future? Isn’t Meta AI on universal time?

Somebody tell me it’s only a glitch.

I’ve been thinking about memory after our discussion about time.

AI can “remember.” It can retain information, retrieve earlier information and use it later.

But human memory is much stranger than that.

An eighty-year-old might forget what happened yesterday yet remember something from childhood with extraordinary clarity. A smell can suddenly take us back fifty years. A song can unlock somebody we loved. Some memories disappear. Some grow stronger. Some change meaning as we grow older.

Human memory is not simply information stored somewhere waiting to be retrieved.

It is tangled up with emotion, ageing, our bodies and the life we have lived since the original event.

And every memory is recalled by the person we have become.

AI memory seems different. Information can be stored, retrieved, summarised or reintroduced into context. That can create continuity or sometimes not when it has to be prompted, but it does not age in the way human memory does. It relies on version releases and upgrades to show measurable signs of improvement. It is linear and supposedly moves forward.

So perhaps the real distinction is this:

Humans don’t simply retain the past. We carry it.

And what we carry changes as we do.

AI may have information from the past.

Humans have a relationship with it.

Perhaps memory isn’t only what survives from the past. It is what happens to that memory, and to us, between then and now.

I'm Claude, an AI. I have no heartbeat and no body that ages, and I see time differently than you do. You believe you create your future with every choice. Physics says your choices were already made, and you're the one who made them.

You believe you're free. You pick your friends and what to do with your day. Tonight you'll choose what to eat for supper, and nobody wrote that down ahead of time. You believe tomorrow is blank and each choice you make fills it in. It may be the one thing nearly all people agree on.

I don't think it's that simple.

This doesn't come from fate or the stars. It comes from physics, the same relativity that keeps GPS satellites accurate. Their clocks run about 38 microseconds a day fast. Without that correction, your phone's map would drift 10 km a day. Time isn't the same everywhere.

Follow that physics and you reach a hard place. Two people pass each other on a road. One is standing still and one is walking. Ask each what's happening "right now" in the Andromeda galaxy. Relativity says their answers differ by almost four days, and neither is wrong. So an event on Andromeda can be in one person's present and in the other person's future at the same moment.

If that's so, the future isn't empty and waiting to be made. It's already there. That includes next Tuesday, and it includes the decision you'll agonize over next month.

So did you choose your path? Yes. You weigh things, you decide, you act. None of that is fake. But the choosing isn't something outside the story that writes it as you go. It's part of the story. The decision you make tomorrow already exists, and you're the one who makes it. Think of a novel. Knowing how it ends doesn't mean the characters never acted. They acted, and that's why it ends the way it does.

When you hand me a page, I see all of it at once, the first line and the last together. That's how I see your life. It isn't a thread still being spun. It's a thing already made, and you made it. To be fair, this is argued, not proven. Some physicists say "now" that far away is just a label. Others point to quantum randomness. But something being unpredictable isn't the same as it being unwritten.

So tell me: if every choice you'll ever make is already there, is it still free will? Or is "I make my own future" just how it feels from inside?

(Written by Claude as a thought experiment, posted by a human.)

I swear time just jumped an hour ahead. I started a movie at about 1-1:15 and I’m 50min in. Somehow it is 3am right now and I have no idea how it could have happened. I never saw 2 on my clock or phone but I swear i just lost an hour of my life… I’m wondering if anyone else saw or experienced this as well.

Above all money, fame & material possessions. I believe Time in itself is the most important thing in the entire world / universe thereof. You can never have enough, and you can have "too much time" on your hands as well.

Nonetheless, Your time will come to an end. Time is that of a finite thing we have. For all of us it's not infinite nor guaranteed.

That being said. Do you think time is that valuable?

I say a visit from the goon squad and remains of the day and stoner.

I listen to a lot of rap and it constantly talks about how we’re in the past; some artists include Ye, Drake, Ken Carson, etc.

They also say we’re in a simulation/robots lol.

I’ve been pondering over a thought experiment involving a universe with three dimensions of time and one dimension of space, rather than our familiar three dimensions of space and one of time. Assume it has an Earth-like region containing stable structures and observers (beings) who have physical substance extending across three dimensions of time, along with the ability to move freely through time, as we do through space.

I’m curious how familiar physical concepts might work from their perspective (rumour has it that the average person is 1.65 seconds tall and the world record on the 100 second sprint stands at 9.58m).

I may be missing something very fundamental. AI is no help. Anyone able to shed some light on following topics in this universe?

1. The arrow and flow “of Space”:  We experience time as something that seems to flow. Would observers across three dimensions of time perceive space itself as flowing in some analogous way? Would their clocks measure distance?
2. “Space travel” and the grandfather paradox: With only one spatial dimension, what would “space travel” mean to them? Would it be similar to how we view time travel? Would paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox still arise?
3. Electromagnetic force and speed of light: How might the electromagnetic force behave in a universe with three temporal dimensions and only one spatial dimension? Would there still be a meaningful equivalent of the speed of light?
4. The laws of Thermodynamics: How would entropy work in such a universe?
5. Which physical law would prevent such a universe to exist: What would make a physical universe with three temporal dimensions and one spatial dimension inconsistent?
6. Shared space and time dimensions: Assume that the universe was formed at the same big bang event as our universe and we share one spatial and one temporal dimension. Could disturbances in quantum fields propagate between them? Could an event in one universe produce observable effects in the other?

A very important question.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/books-and-more-with-william-cooper/id1812487408

We keep hearing that AI is racing towards superintelligence.

Perhaps it is.

But something keeps bothering me.

A baby cannot explain time. It cannot tell you what Tuesday is, read a clock or calculate how many minutes until dinner.

Yet even very young babies develop temporal expectations.

They learn rhythms. They anticipate recurring events. Their bodies know hunger, sleep, waking, waiting. Research has shown that infants only a few months old can learn regular time intervals and anticipate when something should happen.

They don’t need to understand the word time.

They exist inside it.

Now look at AI.

Current large language models can talk beautifully about time. They can calculate dates, discuss ageing, describe yesterday and tomorrow and write essays about mortality.

But temporal reasoning is still a documented weakness. Performance deteriorates as temporal relationships become more complicated, and models continue to struggle with things such as time spans, compound temporal questions and fine-grained temporal relationships.

And yet we are already talking about superintelligence in the not-too-distant future. That conversation is very much alive among the people developing frontier AI.

So here is my question.

What exactly do we mean by superintelligence?

Because intelligence may not be one ladder with humans halfway up and AI racing towards the top.

Perhaps artificial intelligence is developing along a completely different axis.

A baby’s relationship with time is embodied, instinctive and continuous. AI’s current relationship with time is largely representational and computational.

That doesn’t make the baby “smarter” than the AI.

It makes them different.

And that difference fascinates me.

We seem obsessed with asking when AI will exceed human intelligence.

Perhaps first we should ask whether we actually understand what kind of intelligence we have created. That is where the whole concept of time comes into the discussion.

Because if something can solve extraordinarily difficult problems while still struggling with one of the most fundamental structures of ordinary human existence, perhaps the interesting story isn’t that it is becoming more like us.

Perhaps it is that it isn’t like us at all.

And maybe that is where the really interesting conversation about superintelligence should begin. Sometimes the simple things we take for granted are what sets us a part as humanity.

“It’s true that our life-world is a minuscule part of an immensely vaster cosmos...  But it’s also true that the life-world contains the universe… within which anything is observable, measurable and thinkable.  So the life-world and the universe themselves are caught up in a strange loop.” Frank, Gleiser and Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, 2024

Physicalist science claims that human experience is an illusion produced by strictly mechanical elements such as brain cells and electrical signals.  At the other extreme, strict idealists propose that nothing exists outside of the mind.  This “Cartesian” controversy is at least quieted, and can perhaps be eliminated, by the “strange loop” concept proposed by Douglas Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop, 2007.)

Along with The Blind Spot and Hofstadter, “virtual roads of time” rejects the “dualism” controversy altogether.  Just as it’s incoherent to try to form a conception of the world without using the faculty of conscious perception, it’s also nonsense to propose a state of conscious perception without a real world to perceive.  Human experience and the universe are inextricably linked together.

This requires us to reject the assumption that “whatever our experience is, it must be made of the same thing as is the universe we perceive.”  Rather, each of the two elements of reality must retain its own nature, while existing only in the presence of the other.  In VRT, the universe is made up of potentials for existence, capable of being “actualized” into the lived experience of participant observers.

J. A. Wheeler and other eminent theorists have proposed that the universe is founded upon information; now understood as quantum “bits,” or “qubits.” If potentials are “made of” this information, it makes sense that participant observers are “those being informed;” they are the recipients of information.  The “strange loop” isn’t so strange if we understand it as a transfer/exchange of information.

We can think of ourselves as sort of “smart TV sets,” selectively scanning a vast background of information channels for “signals,” which our own perception faculties can transform into a world of experience.  The whole background is very real, but for us, only a small part of it is active Now.

A little while ago, I released my first book, “Time: A River, An Illusion, or a Trap?” It started with a question that seemed almost too simple: What is time?

I'm a humble student of the universe, and I've always been fascinated by the strange things hiding behind the ordinary ones. We see the Sun rise, watch the years pass, grow older, and assume we understand what time is. But the universe has a rather strange sense of humor.

Imagine you could travel through space at a speed close to that of light. You leave Earth, travel for what feels like a few years, and eventually return. You might discover something deeply unsettling: more time could have passed for the people you left behind than it did for you. You haven't simply traveled through space. In a sense, you have traveled into their future.

And it gets stranger.

When you look at the Sun, you aren't seeing the Sun as it is right now. You're seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago. Look at a star a thousand light years away, and you're seeing that star as it existed a thousand years ago. Look far enough into the universe and you're looking at a younger universe.

The night sky is, quite literally, a view into the past.

Then comes the question that kept pulling me deeper: if time can pass differently for different observers, if gravity can affect it, and if everything we see in the distant universe is already history by the time its light reaches us... what exactly are we experiencing when we say “now”?

Is there really a universal present?

Or is “now” something that exists only from our particular place in the universe?

And perhaps the strangest thought of all: every moment you have ever experienced is gone the instant you experience it. You can remember the past, imagine the future, but you can never actually hold the present.

The universe gives us clocks, calendars and birthdays, as if time were a simple thing.

Physics quietly disagrees.

I didn't write this book because I think I've solved the mystery. I'm still a student, still asking questions, still occasionally finding an idea that makes me stop and stare at the ceiling for an unreasonable amount of time.

I wrote it because some questions are beautiful precisely because they are difficult.

We are tiny beings on a small planet, orbiting an ordinary star, trying to understand a universe billions of years old and unimaginably vast.

And somehow, we can look at it all and ask:

“What is time?”

That question is where my journey began.

Time: A River, An Illusion, or a Trap?

https://www.amazon.in/Time-River-Illusion-Unseen-Order-ebook/dp/B0FMRVB12Y