So no which is it? Is time limited, or is it infinite?

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

[maddmaxx 27,957]

Time is almost an artificial definition.  Humans use "time" to schedule their lives and order things but what is "time" really?  We define time as what the clock says.  Is that time or is it "now, before now and after now?  Our normal concept of time is a scalar quantity, flowing past us from past to future.  The moment you read this is already in the past. The next sentence is in the future.

That's all mysticism.

Physics however has difficulty defining time other than as part of the equations in the second law of thermodynamics or the growth of entropy.  I'm not even going to attempt to go there as it hurts my head.  Suffice it to say that time is not the same everywhere.

 

[MickinMD 5,186]

The best book about time is the late Stephen Hawking's, A Brief History of Time.

I only contains one equation, and it's Area = pi x r squared - used just as an example.

Yet Hawking goes deep into the concept of time, explaining it as clearly as the multivariable-calculus based Modern Physics (Relativity) classes I took in college.

Yes, time is limited in terms of how we perceive it and the current math indicates it may be that we can possibly "time travel" forward at accelerated rates but that going backward is not possible.

Nature and natural phenomena are symmetrical - so much so that non-symmetrical occurrences are what led Einstein to the Theory of Relativity.

For a left there's a right, up and down, backward and forward, positive and negative electricity, north and south magnetic poles, etc. etc.

But our experience with time only goes forward and, from a physicist's viewpoint, that's extremely strange.

If you walk to your left then realize you left your keys on a table, you can go reverse and walk to your right and get your keys.

But if you knock a glass of that table and it hits the floor and breaks, you can NOT go back in time and stop the glass from being knocked over.

The late Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time, spends many pages discussing the limitations we see in time.

He concludes that Entropy is "The Arrow of Time" and since time is tied to it, that is the reason we only see it going forward.

Entropy is a measure of disorder and is the natural course of things:  a sand castle on a beach is an ordered thing and, over time, it will decay into randomly distributed grains of sand - a disordered state.  We'd be astonished if grains of sand on a beach blew or were washed into the shape of a sand castle.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is: The Entropy of the Universe always increases.  Since Entropy always increases, we can only see time as going forward.

The universe is expanding - becoming less ordered - and may be part of the reason that entropy "naturally" increases. But what will happen if there's enough matter in the universe to cause enough gravity that the universe eventually stops expanding and starts contracting?  Will time constantly backward?  Will the universe become compacted into a tiny ball from which the next "Big Bang" occurs?  Will time have reversed so that the next Big Bang happens at the same time and date the last Big Bang occurred?  Has the universe been going through a Big Bang, Expansion, Contraction cycle over and over so that there have been an many, many. many Big Bangs?  Do they all happen in the same date range?

If time goes backward, will we all go through all of the posts on Square Wheels 50 billion years from now?  And will that time be in a parallel universe that occurs at the same time as right now?

Of course, one constant is that a kiss is just a kiss as time goes by.

[donkpow 6,746]

It's all very scientific. I could explain it to you but you wouldn't understand. Technically, it's statistical.

[Kirby 17,646]

Does anyone really know what time it is?

[Taylor 1,308]

When I die, time and the universe will cease to exist.

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

Time is like a river. 

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

27 minutes ago, Kirby said:

Does anyone really know what time it is?

A man with one watch does. A man with two or more is never sure.

 

[bikeman564™ 13,909]

30 minutes ago, Kirby said:

Does anyone really know what time it is?

25 or 6 to 4

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

So is time really on our side?

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

Just now, bikeman564™ said:

25 or 6 to 4

do do do do doot. 

[Philander Seabury 29,682]

Time waits for no man. 

[bikeman564™ 13,909]

5 minutes ago, Philander Seabury said:

Time waits for no man. 

but Tom Waits

[jsharr 43,228]

Depends on which side of the Styx you are on.

[Thaddeus Kosciuszko 10,651]

So if we do come to the conclusion that time is indeed infinite, isn't it curious we rarely seem to have enough of it?

[Zealot 4,428]

From everlasting to everlasting...

[12string 3,443]

I'll tell you in a few million years.  Or I won't.