Depending on the view you take - macroscopic versus microscopic, MENTAL VERSUS ACTUAL, or life-sized versus quantum - time either does, doesn’t, might or might not exist BUT IS PROBABLY TOAST.
First the science. We KNOW time is real, right. We feel it moving. Sometimes slowly, sometimes fast depending on how many things you need to get done in a day. It moves in one direction (apparently). It’s shifting sands. It’s a flowing river. It’s an old man with a scythe. It’s inexorable. A fact of reality that comes for us all.
Or is it?
SOME PHYSICISTS SAY NO
So here’s what I get about it from my very simplistic layperson’s understanding (and if you’re a physicist feel free to drop me a correction below if I get it wrong). On the ‘experienced’ level, some physicists think we can only say time is ‘real to us’. We experience it, our mind creates the direction of it. The past is not a place we can revisit. The future is somewhere we get to but never we can currently be. But from a physics point of view, every point on the time continuum might be equal, part of a ‘block universe’ where past, present, and future all exist at once. Time therefore is a function of our human memory.
And the smaller things get, the weirder they are.
While in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, time is relative and dependent on your frame of reference, in the theory of Quantum Mechanics, time isn’t a necessary part of reality at all and only a reflection of ‘change’. It’s led some scientists to develop a theory called ‘loop quantum gravity theory’ which posits a physics where time isn’t necessary at all.
So let’s leave the science there, because my brain is already flailing.
Here’s what I’m really interested in.
Storytellers don’t need permission to break the understood laws of physics. But the ambiguity around time gift us something as creatives that is juicy and delicious.
When I take a step back, the world opens up. When I step into the cracks of uncertainty, possibilities bloom.
What would happen if we didn’t need to worry about ‘time’? If we moved slowly through the world, if time wasn’t ‘of the essence’, and we sat with all its sands at once? I don’t mean to get all ‘Power of Now’ on you, but there’s something in that experience that happens when we gaze at the stars and everything just stops. TIME stops, perhaps because with the taking in of a breath, our minds catch up on the idea that it was never there to begin with.
The idea that reality is very different from what we allow ourselves to experience on the daily, opens up possibilities both as a creative and a seeker.
I don’t need to know the definitive answer the question of ‘does time really exist’ for it to already expand my universe.