• Question: Could time be a kind of illusion? Why is the meaning of time and what is time itself?

    Asked by anon-184890 to William, Rebecca, Martyna, Callum, Alice, Adam on 9 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Adam Berlie

      Adam Berlie answered on 9 Nov 2018:


      I don’t think time is an illusion, it just seems like a convienient way to quantify (give a number to) something. If you look at your ruler, then you can measure distances, you don’t think that the distance you’ve measured is not true do you? You believe it because you know that your ruler is 30 cm long, or something like that. Time works in pretty much the same way, if you take a line, then you can go from beginning to end and trace out points along it. Much like when we think about the past, present and future – we are just refering to points along a line. However, the question is, whether the line that corresponds to time is stright, could it have bends and wiggles in it? That I don’t know…

    • Photo: Rebecca Roddan

      Rebecca Roddan answered on 11 Nov 2018:


      I wouldn’t say time is an illusion, its just something we use to track when things happened and to monitor things in the future. It’d be really complicated to organise or measure loads of things if we didn’t measure time.

    • Photo: Martyna Pastok

      Martyna Pastok answered on 14 Nov 2018:


      Time is not an illusion. It is the way we measure the distance between past and future. And we build our everyday life based on this measurements and agreed ways to express time.

    • Photo: William Glass

      William Glass answered on 14 Nov 2018: last edited 14 Nov 2018 10:44 am


      I don’t think time is an illusion, it is always thought of as an arrow (going from the past to the future, much like Adam’s ruler analogy). There’s a great book on the thermodynamics I’ve read that links time to the entropy (the measure of how disordered things are) which is really interesting. Great question!

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