But why do we never ask ourselves the serious question or whether time exists or not? It seems pretty likely that it does. Just as we know the air is there from its effects ( it moves trees and creates the winds ) we know time is there since clocks and everything else for that matter, moves forwards at a constant rate throughout the day. Every second a second hand will move, every second a heart will beat. But is this just an illusion, a great veil we have drawn up in front of ourselves to cover up a greater truth. Many people have speculated as to whether this is true or not and as to whether this "greater truth" could be God or some other spiritual being.
I ask the question - is this seemingly constant thing really a constant, or is that just how we perceive it. There are a great many mysteries surrounding time. For a start basic physics questions it. What was time before the Big Bang theory for example. What is all this 'special relativity' stuff which Einstein was on about. Apparently time would be slower for someone moving more slowly - an athlete is actually moving more slowly through time than somebody sitting still. However the difference is so small it is unmeasurable ( almost ). But WHY?
Time is something we perceive to happen. We subconsciously expect a clock to tick and predict when it is next going to tick. But could we stop it if we tried? Not likely. Try it now, sit next to a clock and try to imagine it stopping at one tick, not moving forwards. It is impossible. Our minds almost want us to believe in time for some bizarre reason, as if stopping this inevitable continuation would cause an impossible change which might alter the running of the universe. Well... Perhaps not something that drastic but the fact remains that the thought of time stopping feels just out of reach, as if it is something that we know is there and could happen, but is beyond our mental capabilities. Perhaps this is the limitation that so many religious people search for when questioning how we can never understand God.
Another interesting scenario would be to imagine the world, only in reverse. Every animal backtracking, every seismic process in the earth's core suddenly reversing. Perhaps for five seconds. The universe would return to the state it was in five seconds ago. But what about time? Has time moved forwards in order to allow this to happen? Or has it moved backwards? It is confusing. If we say it has moved forwards then that would mean time was an irrelevant measurement, redundant and something unneeded. If there was a certain amount of time left for the earth, or for the sun to supernove, that has just been e tended by five seconds. Or has its. Nobody would notice a shift in time as sudden as this, since everyone's brains would return to the state they were five seconds prior to the 'time' shift. Therefore this process could actually be happening every second of every day. In fact we could all currently exist in some form in different periods of history. Everything could rely on this fact.
Well, that is all theoretical and is of course impossible to find out. There is only one truth. That is that times is completely redundant and irrelevant and useless, that is until we introduce the human factor.
