Humans have been fascinated with time ever since we first became thinking individuals. If we were to look up the definition of the word time it would sound something like this, the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future regarded as a whole. At first glance this may sound educational, but if we examine it a little further are we really learning anything? We can’t really see time directly and have to use instruments, watch the heavens or watch the aging process to know time has passed. Could it be there really is nothing called time and it is just a term made up by humans to explain changes? Scientists have said time is the fourth dimension, but if it is it certainly doesn’t demonstrate anything comparable to the first three. If we were to go to another world where people lived longer, would it be because of biological factors or could this mysterious thing called time work different for them?

Humans have been obsessed with measuring time for thousands of years. Whether time truly exists or not, time measurements can come in very handy. They showed ancient humans when to plant their crops and also when to gather them in. Even if time is just something which exists in our head the measurements of it have helped us to survive. There are many theories about time, this is probably because we been thinking about it so long. One of the theories states pretty much what I said in the beginning, there is really no flow of time and what we think of as a flow of time is just an illusion and past, present and future all are real and exist and are timeless. What this means is it might be possible for us to get around to these different periods someday. If we believe this theory we wouldn’t need a time machine, because time doesn’t really exist. We would need some other way to jump around from one of these states to another.

I think one of the most interesting things about the different theories of time is we may not be living where we think we are. There are theories out there which claim we are not necessarily living in the present. If the future, the past and the present all exist at the same time who is to say which one of these places we actually inhabit? In a way we know everything we see is in our past, because it does take some time for light waves to reach our eyes, but we are only talking about a minuscule delay in our dealings on earth. This is not true of course when we examine the heavens and in some cases we are looking at things which happened billions of years ago because that is how long it is taking the light from these events to reach us, which means what we are looking at may not even exist anymore.

One of the real freaky things about what we call time is the instruments that measure it will show time running faster in higher places than in lower places. If we were to place a clock on the top of a mountain and another one in a valley, the clock on the mountaintop would show time passing faster. This means if time actually exists it is running at different rates depending on where you are. But could the reason in the difference in the clocks be because of something else? Scientists have noticed gravity also changes with altitude. Could it be this is the reason for the difference in the measurement of time by our clocks? The difference in the measurement of time by the clocks was so slight it would have taken seventy-nine years for the higher clock to get ahead ninety billionths of the second.

If you and I were looking at the same event and I was sitting on a park bench and you were jogging by, the speed of the event happening would be different for the two of us. Einstein said events happening to a person in motion which appear simultaneous may not look that way to somebody standing still. I know this sounds very confusing, but it could be one of the reasons why police get different stories about what is happening from different witnesses who see a crime being committed. One reason why a few scientists may think time doesn’t exist has to do with black holes. Einstein said if someone or something is falling into a black hole and we were watching from a distance, it would seem to us as this person or object got closer to the center of the black hole it would slow down until it just seemed to float on top of the black hole forever, but if it was a person which was entering the black hole they would notice nothing different. Does this mean time would be different for these two people or is this happening because time doesn’t really exist?

If we believe time exists and as it passes things degrade, because of the disbursal of energy scientists wonder where does all this energy go? What we are really talking about here is reversing time, but if time doesn’t really exist is there really anything to reverse? Could it be the reason we have not achieved time travel is because there is no time? If there is no time what is really going on, why are things crumbling, aging and falling apart? Unfortunately if time doesn’t exist the answer to this question is evading us. In the future we may find out it is not time which causes aging at all, but something quite different.

Most scientists believe time does exist and gravity is tied in with it as is speed. This raises a question about space travel. There have been times where astronomers have seen objects heading towards earth and have said there would be a certain period of time before they reached us. If someone was on one of these objects which was speeding towards us their calculation for reaching an area by us would show they were getting here much faster than we calculated, because time flows different for people on speeding objects, it slows down for them. This makes their trip seem shorter, because their biological functions have slowed including aging.  Someday humans may actually find out what is really going on.