Where’s time come from? When the universe arose, the time is objective existence, but we don’t know how can we understand the time.
Paul Davies’s heart is filled with all sorts of questions. As a physicist at Arizona State University, he has studied a wide range of fields, from abstract theoretical physics and cosmology to more specific astrobiology—the study of life outside the Earth. Recently, the Nautilus website had a conversation with Paul Davis and naturally talked about time, which is a topic he has long been interested in. The following is a partial record of this conversation.
Time flow is an illusion, and sincerely, I don’t know how many scientists and philosophers will disagree. The reason why it is an illusion is because if you don’t think so, what does the so-called time flow mean? When we say something flows like a river, it means that sometime a part of the river is in another position at some point before. In other words, the river will move with time. However, time cannot move with time – time is time. Many people make a mistake in thinking that the time does not flow means that there is no time and time does not exist. This is ridiculous. Time certainly exists. We use a clock to measure it. The measures of clock is not the flow of time, but the interval of measurement time. Of course, there are time intervals between different events, this is exactly what the clocks measure.