Day: April 7, 2017

Will Time End?

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Time is a curious thing. Time can be exact. Time can be imprecise. Time can be slow for some and faster for others.

In our recent video on what happens when you die, we briefly touched upon an idea which may be relevant to the question of whether time can have a conclusion. Robert Lanza believes that consciousness is fundamental to the concept of time, and that without conscious beings, time simply stops existing. I guess it’s similar to the old thought experiment which asks if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If nobody’s there to perceive it, does an event happen? Is perception the fundamental driver of all things, even the things we cannot control?

Current estimates peg the age of our universe at around 14 billion years old, but according to some physicists we may not make it out of our teens, as they believe time could grind to a halt five billion years from now. Or 3 billion years from now. Or in one second. Damn, I hope I’m wearing clean underwear.

You’ve heard of the big bang, but what about the big crunch? Sounds delicious right? Wrong. The big crunch is a theoretical ending to the universe whereby everything that ever was and ever has been coalesces into one final singularity; an ultra-dense region where you, Jupiter and giraffes are all smushed into a single point, within which time, according to physics, ceases to exist.

As human beings get older a common complaint is that time seems to feel like its speeding up. Your twenties go by in a whiz, your thirties are mere seconds, and before you know it you’re soiling yourself in an old folks home and bam you’re dead. So why does this happen? And could we ever manipulate this feeling?

We think of time as something which exists universally and which is experienced by everyone and everything in the same way. But that’s not true, as time dilation shows us. According to special relativity, the faster you go the slower times moves.