George

Plato argued that time is constant - it’s life that’s the illusion. Galileo shrugged over the philosophy of time and figured out how to plot it on a graph so he could get on with the important physics. Albert Einstein said that time is just another dimension, a fourth one to go along with the up-down, side-side, forward-back we move through every day. Our understanding of time, Einstein said, is based on its relationship to our environment. Weirdly, the faster you travel, the slower time moves. The most radical interpretation of his theory: Past, present, and future are merely figments of our imagination, constructs built by our brains so that everything doesn’t seem to happen at once.

Einstein’s conception of unified spacetime works better on graph paper than in the real world. Time isn’t like those other dimensions - for one thing, we move only one way within it. “What’s needed is not to make the notion of time and general relativity work or to go back to the notion of absolute time, but to invent something radically new,” says Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.

Others, including famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, note that time is defined by entropy. That is, the universe, in its current expanding direction, is becoming more and more disordered- entropy is increasing and always has been since the inception of the universe, as is time. Thus, time can represented as a measure of entropy in the universe.

Somebody is going to get it right eventually. It’ll just take time.

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redcliff

Many people think that time is a derivative, that it isn't a truly fundamental concept, one of the them is Julian Barbour who wrote the book:

The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

An interesting read

Fire Legion

Time as we know it is man made. The passage of events is constant, but there is no material 'second' or 'minute'

The An-Jel

The actual terms are manmade yeah. The terms Time, second, and minute are used for our understanding of the physical phenomena of Time. The Physical Phenomena as I am sure anyone can argue is pretty self-evident. Motion would be pretty impossible without Time.

I think what bothers me and I been working on a theory for Time is that it destorts under Supergravitional conditions as I understand it so far. M-Theory and all that fun seem to want to complicate the problem further with multi-vibrational strings which extend as 'other' dimensions. I dunno like I said working like a layman on this I feel like I am just coloring in numbers on a preexisting pattern painted by someone else. Anyway I am babbling. Physicists can't even seem to tie Gravity with itself yet so the real answer to the phenomena of Time is yet to be explained.

Is time an illusion? The question to me is like asking is EVERYTHING an illusion like watching 'Superman Returns' and asking if that is real.

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"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

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Number 6

If you ever had to wait for a woman to finish dressing you'd know that time is woman made.
and time is not a constant according to relativity.
time exists the question if it is fundametal and if it exists in extreme conditions.

Om

At the risk of being flip ... I'm agnostic on the question of Time.

As a species we have a strong need to label the different aspects of our universe. We label to achieve some sense of control. Time is a tricky aspect, yes, but still just that.

We have labeled Time in order to feel more secure in our place, to provide a common frame of reference to communicate with one another and record our passing. To impart a sense of order and continuity that our species either "needs" on some level, or perhaps is simply the default setting wired into our still-evolving senses.

What Time is--if it is anything beyond a human construct at all--is a great question, but one we are far indeed from answering. What we do not know yet, for instance, is how, if they do at all, other living beings perceive it. Does a tree perceive time? A hummingbird? A dolphin? A sentient being perceiving it's surroundings elsewhere in the universe?

Given we have no frame of reference outside our own human perceptions against which to compare and contrast, all we have is our label. Like with most of the Really Big Questions, we just don't know yet.

And that's okay. Because barring an extinction level event ... we've got time.

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