A ticking clock on my wrist, an alarm clock beside my bed, empty calendar boxes. It may seem that time is whole and unified, and we all live in this stream, trying not to be late for work and picking up children from school on time. Sometimes we just look at the clock and wish there was more time in the day. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day and three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Time is one and absolute, according to Sir Isaac Newton. But what if I told you that time is an illusion, a manifestation of our notions of causality?

If your school of science is worth anything, you probably know that there are three supposed dimensions of space and a fourth, time dimension. Four dimensions make up the completeness of the space-time continuum. Isaac Newton, one of the forefathers of modern mathematics and the inventor (or rather, the discoverer) of calculus, introduced a lot of invaluable ideas into physics. Among the most important of these are the three laws of motion, which describe the relationship between objects and the forces of nature that interact with them. Another important idea - important to our discussion - is the concept of absolute space and absolute time.

Newton's laws suggest that time is a constant in the universe, it flows without any external influence and is always the same for all its observers. But we know that Einstein's theory of relativity contradicts Newton's opinion. Time flows differently in Moscow and on Mars. It behaves differently at the foot of Mount Fuji and at the event horizon of a black hole. Time changes as you move faster. And when Einstein first got it, his vision literally changed everything we knew about physics. However, a few individuals decided to take his ideas to the extreme.

Three physicists, Amrit Sorli, David Fiscaletti, and Duzan Klinar, ask you to represent time as the x-axis on a graph; the variable will help visualize the evolution of a physical system (a physical system in our universe). We measure the frequency and speed of an object, but time is usually not measured. In addition, its mathematical value is usually not taken into account. Essentially, we are not dealing with time as a variable, but using the movement of an object to obtain other information. According to the scientists, this would mean that Minkowski space is not three-dimensional, but four-dimensional, without the need to separate one dimension under time. One more time:

“The view that time is represented by a physical entity in which material changes take place is replaced by a more convenient view that time will be simply the numerical order of material change. This view better corresponds to the physical world and better explains instantaneous physical phenomena: gravity, electrostatic interaction, information transfer during an EPR experiment, and others.”

They believe that this view is better suited for now:

“The idea that time is the fourth dimension of space has not brought much progress to physics and is in conflict with the formalism of special relativity. We are now developing a formalism for a three-dimensional quantum space based on Planck's work. It seems that the universe is three-dimensional at the macro and micro levels in Planck volumes. In such a three-dimensional space there is no "length contraction", no "time dilation". What is there is the rate of material change, which is “relative” in the Einsteinian sense.”

When they talk about Einsteinian meaning, they are referring in part to Einstein's commentary in his own book on the theory of relativity.

“Because there is no longer any section in this four-dimensional structure in which “now” is presented objectively, the concepts of “happening” and “happening” do not yet disappear completely, but become very complicated. It seems more natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional being, rather than as an evolution of a three-dimensional being."

And one more time. Let's imagine a mental .

You have a photon that moves back and forth between two points in space. The space between them consists entirely of Planck lengths, that is, of the smallest distances that a photon can travel at a moment in time. When a photon travels the Planck length, it is described as traveling solely in space and not entirely in time.

The photon can be thought of as moving from point 1 to point 2, and its position at point 1 is "before" the position at point 2 in the sense that the number 1 comes before the number 2 in the number sequence. The numerical order is not equivalent to the temporal order, that is, the number 1 in time does not exist before the number 2, only numerically.

This experiment shows that time may simply be a numerical order of change, and not a fourth dimension. Viewing time in this way - as a way of tracking change over time - will not only resolve Zeno's paradoxes about motion (Achilles and the tortoise, for example), but will also allow a better description of the characteristics of the natural world.

“The theory of time as a fourth dimension in space is a falsification, and with our latest work we show that there is a high probability of this falsification. Experimental evidence shows that time is what we measure with clocks. And by the clock we measure the numerical order of material changes, that is, the movement in space.

No time. There is a movement of matter in space, which is perceived by us as time. Time is the same artificial notion of physicists as energy. After all, there is no energy! Energy does not exist "in pure form". There is movement perceived as a measure of kinetic energy. There is the height of the body, perceived as potential energy. There is electromagnetic radiation, which physicists sometimes really call energy. But this is just a figure of speech. The same as "the kettle boiled." The kettle is not boiling, the water is boiling in the kettle. It's just that after Einstein wrote his great formula, E=mc2, people began to say that science had established a connection between energy and mass. In fact, with the help of Einstein's formula, it became possible to express any energy in units of mass (kilograms), and any mass in units of energy (joules). No more. And in the physical sense, the formula established a connection between matter and radiation. Radiation is not energy. Radiation is matter. Matter has three hypostases - substance, field, vacuum. And the fictitious energy of physics was invented to calculate processes. And so they got used to it that they began to perceive it as something independently existing.

So time is just a certain invented value, convenient for calculations. There is no energy in the world. There is no time in the world, there is only moving matter. Actually, time is always measured by uniform motion - by the course of the hands in the clock, by the pouring of sand in a glass flask, by the revolutions of the Earth around the Sun.

Why is time directed? Indeed, in space you can move both to the right and to the left, both forward and backward, and in time - only forward. Why does the arrow of time exist? For the same reason: there is no time. Time is manifested through the laws of motion of matter. And they are such that some processes are directed. This, in fact, is perceived by us as an arrow of time.

For example, heat from a hot body is transferred to a less heated one. Why? But purely statistical. After all, heat is a measure of the speed of body particles. Hot, that is, fast particles, knocking with cold ones, transfer part of their momentum to them, the velocities are equalized. Of course, a variant is theoretically possible when a slow particle hits a fast one so successfully that the speed of the fast one increases even more, and the slow one stops completely. But this is an extremely unlikely spatial combination of velocities and directions of movement (the slow atom "caught up" behind the fast atom and pushed it at a certain angle). Most often, ordinary chaotic collisions occur, equalizing the speeds. So the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which prohibits the transfer of heat from cold bodies to hot ones, is purely statistical in nature. And the heat death of the Universe predicted by Clausius is a child of statistical physics… This is the thermodynamic component of the arrow of time. There are other components as well.

When two protons collide, a nucleus of "heavy hydrogen", a positron and a neutrino is obtained. This is one of those reactions that take place in the depths of stars of small mass. Theoretically, all reactions in nature are reversible. But! After the collision, the neutrino flew away from the star at the speed of light - and remember your name. Theoretically, one can imagine a meeting of heavy hydrogen, a positron, and a stray neutrino. However, the probability of this meeting, firstly, is extremely small. And secondly, neutrinos practically do not interact with matter. This stray particle can easily pierce a lead slab as thick as the Earth to the Sun. So for this reason, the likelihood of a backlash is negligible. That is why the stars shine because directed (irreversible) reactions go into them.

Does time really exist? In the distant, distant times, when people did not fill their heads with stupid questions, everything was clear to everyone. Here, for example, is the past - there are ancestors, the accumulated experience of battles and crafts, here is the present, when you need to somehow survive, and here is the eternally foggy future. Times are very different now. Of course, science has made tremendous progress in the study of time since then, but to this day, scientists cannot say with certainty whether the past, present and future really exist. The first scientist who decided to seriously tackle this problem was Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton At the end of the 17th century, he decided that it was time to decide what time is. In his famous work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, he described it as an absolute phenomenon that exists independently of everything around. For Newton, time was linear and orderly, and we sail through it like a ship on the sea, leaving behind the past and striving for the future. And everything was simple and clear until Albert Einstein appeared on the horizon.

Albert Einstein He presented his theory of relativity, which dispelled the myth of time as a universal concept. He stated that there is no way to define events as occurring simultaneously and, not only the perception of time, but it itself is different for each of us. For example, for people moving at different speeds, the present also flows differently. Each of us perceives the concept of "now" based only on our own feelings. But even if the concept of "now" is subjective, how to define what is "yesterday". Since then, there has been confusion over time. The situation worsened even more when Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes the laws of physics on a global scale, collided with quantum physics, which studies the smallest particles. Logically, everything in the universe should be interconnected and work according to general laws, no matter what it is: a microscopic particle or a huge galaxy. But it was not there. Scientists have already gone off their feet in search of a way to solve this problem. Until it occurred to them that they needed to derive the so-called grand unifying equation. Two physicists, John Wheeler and Bryce-de Witt, managed to solve this problem, but the resulting equation baffled the entire scientific world.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation The fact is that if the equation is correct, then at the fundamental level of matter, time, in principle, does not exist, which means that there is no past, present, or future. But Wheeler and Bryce did not see any problem in this: the past and future are only our interpretation of reality and the changes taking place in it, and at the level of photons and protons, time is generally irrelevant. British scientist Julian Barbour also believes that time is nothing more than our own illusion.

Julian Barbour In his book The End of Time, he writes that the universe is a collection of solid, complete, statistical moments. He calls out "now". Imagine a stack of photographs, each picture is the "now" of the whole universe, a unique set of everything that is in it, from the smallest particles to galaxies, somewhere there we flicker with our memories, plans and hopes. In this world, the past, present and future exist at the same time, and if you put all these pictures into an album, you get a story. Many modern physicists adhere to a similar theory, the so-called block universe. It is actively promoted to the masses by the professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Bradford Skou. He is sure that our past, present and future coexist side by side, like many points of one four-dimensional space. Then why do we perceive time as irreversible and moving forward? The fact is that the brain needs to divide life into some time intervals so that we live easier and more understandably, but in nature everything is possible in a completely different way. After all, we can't know for sure what's really going on. We only have what our brain produces as a result of information processing. Perhaps there is nothing at all: neither time nor matter, but only our thoughts. But what about our memories of the past, we remember it! The fact is that memories are just our thoughts about what happened. Thought itself exists now, not in the past. So is it worth it to believe the memories in this case, and can they be replaced?

Many philosophers have pondered over this question, from ancient times to our days. In reality, what is time, and who has set the limits of its calculation?

We all know how time can drag on at work, at school or college. When a person feels bad or bored, the day stretches incredibly, and the weekend, on the contrary, flies by in an instant. You say that this is a subjective opinion? But why then do all people agree on this aspect?

Take, for example, the story of a German officer (I don’t remember his last name, but it doesn’t matter), who was interrogated by our intelligence officers in 1946. He was subjected to torture, which was once very popular among the ancient Chinese. The prisoner was immured for the whole night in a narrow, dark and damp niche, of such dimensions that it was possible to fit in it only while standing, water was slowly dripping on his head. The result was unexpected - when the officer was taken out of the niche the next morning, it turned out that he was damaged in his mind ... Do you think he was a weakling, a spineless coward?

Try for a second to imagine that you were immured in such a room. You are among the enemies and no one knows about it. Besides, no one said that you will spend only one night here, there is a possibility that you were walled up forever. It seems that even in such conditions one can survive at least one night. But then the most terrible factor comes into play - time ... It stretches, each, until the mind, in search of salvation, plunges into impenetrable darkness. Psychologists say that the mind never runs away from anything, but changes the perception of the surrounding reality. So does time exist? Here is what one of the most famous mystics and philosophers of the 20th century thought about this -.

Carlos Castaneda - Does time exist?

According to his teaching, physical reality as such does not exist, but there is a picture of the description of the world. In other words, we are all bundles of energy, floating peacefully in endless space and imagining ourselves as kings and beggars, businessmen and employees, and who knows who else ...

Castaneda believed that the whole world is conditionally divided into two parts: what you can see, what you can think about, talk about - the tonal. Man is capable of perceiving the tonal; moreover, the tonal is the only thing we know. The second part is the nagual, he cannot be perceived and even thought about him is impossible. There is only one thing to say about the nagual - he is.

What we are accustomed to call time is the time of the tonal. This is a clear sequence of events, the cycle is continuous and unbreakable. On the other hand, according to Castaneda's ideas, there is the time of the nagual - the time of the unknown, the miraculous. At this time, absolutely everything becomes possible - magical healing from diseases, flying through the air, changing appearance, personality, visiting other worlds. But the strangest thing is that the sequence of events disappears, because the time of the nagual does not flow in one direction. If taken as true, then in this case it is quite difficult to understand - does time exist at all or is it another abstract representation created by man solely for convenience?

Paradoxes of time - mysteries of the universe

While we are on Earth, it is not difficult for us to determine the time, breaking it into landmarks - minute, hour, day, year. Even if, as a result of an unknown cataclysm, all the chronometers of the planet failed, it would be possible to determine the time by the sun. But it only costs, and the task becomes much more difficult - where is the top, where is the bottom? Where is the beginning of a new day, a new year, a new era?

Past and future - another illusion created by human memory. Does time exist beyond the current moment? Have you ever wanted to have clairvoyant skills, to be able to see what happened, for example, 50 years ago? Look at the Sun - you can see what happened 8 minutes ago (that's how long it takes light to reach the earth).

Now imagine that you were transferred to one of the stars located at a distance from our Earth at a distance of 50 light years. If at the same time you gain some fantastic vision, you can see the events that took place on Earth half a century ago. The calculation is simple - the eye perceives light rays that carry information about events long past through the universe. Thus, you can see how those who have already grown old play in the sandbox, how those who have already died work, relax, and realize their plans.

A small star, which can be seen in the sky on a cloudless night, can cease to exist at any second, and people on earth will continue to see it for many years, maybe decades - isn't this a paradox?

Another paradox, no less mysterious - why do people think that time speeds up with age - does it go slower in childhood? Obviously, this cannot be, otherwise our globe would already be rotating at a terrifying speed, which means that it's all about perception. An adult person spends most of his life in a half-somnambulistic state - he returns to past mistakes, relives them anew, makes plans for the future. And, of course, worries about a lot of things - that's where our race has reached perfection. Plus, monotonous work duties that take too much time, the desire to do everything. The current moment is lost - we live either in the past or in the future, but it is worth concentrating on the present for a second and the thought comes to mind - “Wow! A day (a week, a month, a year) has already passed, so quickly!”

A child perceives the world in a completely different way - every moment is filled with a unique meaning for him, he lives in one moment. An hour of such a "conscious" life will bring more impressions than a week (or even a month) of an adult's life. For a child, the world has not yet lost its mystery, has not become gray and boring. He does not need any stimulants (alcohol, drugs) to make the world come alive.

Tale of the mysteries of time

There is one Eastern legend, a fairy tale that tells about another paradox associated with the perception of a person. There lived in ancient times a caliph. The ruler had everything - a luxurious palace, a harem full of beauties, a treasury filled with the most exquisite jewelry, gold. The enemies trembled before the power of the caliph, and the subjects worshiped him as God. But the life of the ruler was overshadowed by one thought - he thought about the transience of his existence.

The caliph summoned the court magician and asked him if he could make his life longer. The sage thought for a moment and shook his head - only Allah can do such a thing, he replied. The ruler insisted, and then the magician gave him one piece of advice: "at noon, go to the seashore, take a jug with you, fill it with water, sit down and look into it." The caliph did as the sage advised him, and little by little, from immobile contemplation, he was drawn to sleep...

Waking up, the ruler could not recognize his country - his palace and courtiers disappeared, and even the area changed. The caliph decided that the magician had cast an evil spell on him, which had thrown the ruler to no one knows where. Time passed, and Vladyka could not find out how to return to his homeland - people shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment when he tried to figure out the way. The caliph had to earn his living - he became a fisherman, married a girl from a poor family and they lived in a thatched hut.

For more than ten years, the caliph lived in this way - he fished, he sold it on the market, and supported his family with the proceeds, by that time he already had two sons. Once, for the whole day, he could not catch a single fish, and returned home sad and tired. Suddenly, some unusual object lying at the water's edge, resembling in shape, attracted his attention. The fisherman came closer, sat down on the sand and picked it up - it was a jug of water...

The mage gently shook the ruler by the shoulder. “Now tell me, my lord, does time exist?” - he asked. The caliph did not answer the sage, but as the legend tells, since then he has been much more condescending towards ordinary people.

This rather uncomplicated tale involuntarily leads to reflection. What if, in fact, one moment can stretch for several years with the proper tuning of consciousness? Some psychologists who have studied the problem of suicide believe that before death, the suicide experiences agony, which for him stretches for an eternity. True, what this opinion is based on is not very clear - they did not, in fact, ask suicides. But if we take the tale of the eastern caliph as true, then I think many would have no desire to experiment - is it worth turning these few moments into an eternity in hell?

Physicists have made a shocking discovery - in nature, time does not exist and never existed! In nature, only processes take place, they can be periodic or non-periodic. The concept of "time" was invented by people for their own convenience. Time is a measure of the distance between two events.

Who invented the first watch?

Man has invented many ways to measure time. First, time was measured in sunrises and sunsets. An increase or decrease in the shadow falling from various objects - stones, trees, helped a person to at least somehow navigate in time. The time was also determined by the stars (different stars are visible at different times at night).

The ancient Egyptians divided the night into twelve periods. Each gap began with the rising of one of twelve specific stars. The Egyptians divided the day into the same number of intervals. This is the basis of our division of the day into 24 hours.

Later, the Egyptians created shadow clocks (we call them sun clocks). They are a simple wooden stick with marks. The shadow clock became the first human invention designed to measure time. Of course, a sundial could not tell the time on a cloudy day and at night. One of the oldest written documents dating back to 732 BC. about the sundial is the Bible (twentieth chapter of the Book of Kings). It mentions the obelisk clock of King Ahaz. A sundial of the 13th and 15th centuries discovered during excavations. BC. testify that in reality the sundial appeared much earlier than the writings say.

The ancient Egyptians also created a water clock. They measured the length of time during which the liquid flows from one vessel to another.

The hourglass appeared in the 8th century. They are two soldered flasks. Sand poured into one of the flasks is poured through the narrow neck of the other flask in a certain period of time, for example, in an hour. After that, the clock is turned over. Hourglasses are cheap, reliable, so they still have not disappeared from.

Mechanical watches appeared in Europe in the 1300s, they worked with the help of springs. They had no hands, and a bell signaled the passage of the hour.

Modern electronic and quartz watches use vibrations of quartz crystals.

The standard is atomic scales. They measure the transition time of an atom from a negative to a positive energy state and vice versa.