Does Time Exist? How Do We Know?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

How do we know that time exists?

The alarm goes off in the morning. You catch your morning train to the office. You take a lunch break. You catch your evening train back. You go for an hour's run. Eat dinner. Go to bed. Repeat. Birthdays are celebrated, anniversaries chronicled, deaths commemorated. New countries are born, empires rise and fall.

The whole of human existence is bound to the passage of time. However, we can't see it and we can't touch it. So, how do we know that it's really there?

In physics, we have what we call the idea of absolute time' and it's used to describe different changes as a sequence of events," Koyama begins. We use Newtonian physics to describe how things move, and time is an essential element of this." Koyama is a Professor of Cosmology in the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth.

To this day, classic Newtonian thought on time - where time is constant throughout the universe - is still a good approximation of how humans experience time in their daily lives. We all experience time in the same way and we all synchronize our clocks in the same way, no matter where we are in the world, whether that be London, Tokyo, New York, or Buenos Aires.

Physicists though have discovered that time can actually behave differently and is not as consistent as Newton thought.

When we speak of time, we need to think of space as well - they come in a package together," Koyama says. We cannot disconnect the two, and the way that an object moves through space determines how it experiences time."

In short, the time you experience depends on your velocity through space as the observer. This works as outlined through Einstein's special relativity, a theory of how speed impacts mass, time, and space. Additionally, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the gravity of a massive object can impact how quickly time passes. Many experiments have been undertaken that have since proven this to be true.

Physicists have even found that black holes warp the immediate space-time around them due to their immense gravitational fields. Supported by the European Research Council, Koyama continues to investigate this theory.

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