Âé¶¹´«Ã½

About time, too: Your questions answered

20 January 2010

Is time a real phenomenon or a human perception?

cathal76

Time is real! That’s my position, anyway.

More specifically, time isn’t real in the same way that a basketball is “real” – it’s not something you can poke at or hold in your hands. Instead, we should say that time – like space and quarks – is “real” if it is a useful concept in our best understanding of how the universe works. And that’s certainly true. In every theory that we have – Newtonian mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics – time plays a central role. That’s not to say a better theory won’t come along where time isn’t fundamental, but even then, that theory will have to…

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