Time is not real, but rather a human fabrication to help us discern between now and our perception of the past, a hypothesis states. The notion of time is an illusion created from human memories, but everything that has ever been and ever will be is taking place right now, and only now.
That is the idea according to a group of renowned physicists who intend to solve the Universe‘s enigmas. The majority of people do not even consider the notion of time, but there is absolutely no evidence in the laws of physics to claim that it should move in the forward line that we believe it does. The laws of physics are always equal, which means that time could have easily moved in a backward line as it does forward.
Time is a Human Construct
Some supporters of the ‘big crunch’ hypothesis state that time will actually move backwards when the Universe stops expanding and begins shrinking back in on itself. This mystery as to why we see time moving in a forward direction has led researchers to question the reason.
Some have determined that time is a human construct, stating that there is a ‘block-universe’ where both time and space are linked, also known as ‘spacetime.’ This hypothesis is based on Einstein’s theory of relativity and argues that space and time are a component of a four-dimensional structure where everything that has taken place has its own parameters in spacetime. This would make possible for everything to be ‘real’ in a way that the past, as well as the future, are still in spacetime, which makes everything symmetrically important as the present.
Max Tegmark, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there’s nothing that’s changing; it’s all just there — past, present, future.”
“We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t yet exist, and that things are changing. But all I’m ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories.”
There is Nothing Else But Now
Julian Barbour, a British physicist who wrote several books on the subject of time, depicts everything as a sequence of ‘now.’ Dr. Barbour told Adam Frank, a physicist, and author, in the book ‘About Time: cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang:’ “As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they?”
He adds to the spacetime theory: “You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now, and I call the country Platonia because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules.”
Also, Dr. Barbour says that what we sense as the past is an illusion formed in our brain: “The only evidence you have of last week is your memory. But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the Earth’s past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present.
“The point is, all we have are these records, and you only have them in this Now.”
