• Question: What exactly is time?

    Asked by dumhead456 to Hermine, Katy, Laura, Nathalie, Paula on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      That is a very difficult question and since I myself also find it hard to understand, I’m going to have to refer you to the wikipedia info on that one:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The time is exactly 11:19:52 on 21st June 2010…. 😉

      This is one of those questions that makes my head spin becuase there are so many answers!! Philosphers would have a field day with this question and i think it’s something that scientists and philosophers (and people in general) have been trying to explain for centuries. On the simplest level, time is a way of ordering events (this happened, then this happened, then this will happen) and also being able to measure how long those events are or when those events occur, compared to other events. We also use time to say what is about to happen, for example…..”Is it naked time yet?” – a serious question asked by my friend’s 3 year old son at a BBQ on Saturday, lol!!

      But just to demonstrate how complicated a subject this is, here are some web definitions for TIME:
      http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:time&sa=X&ei=XT0fTLTzFpLN4gbQn9H6DQ&ved=0CBcQkAE

    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Ah – you are not the first one to ask, we had this question last week. The immediate answer is that time is a measuring system that allow us to compare the duration of events and the intervals between them. But there is a more philosophical angle to that – i.e., what’s the exact nature of time? can we travel it? And there, there is a debate – some think that time is a dimension where events occur in sequence; some other think that time is just a human intellectual structure. I’ve answered this question twice, and I still enjoy that question – a very good question 😉

    • Photo: Laura Dixon

      Laura Dixon answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      That’s a very philosophical question! 🙂 Time is relative to what it is being measured in but is generally a series of events passing in a set order.

    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Time is best defined as the measurement of increase of universal entropy. All the the units of time that we use come from random phenomena (Earth’s rotation rate, procession rate around the sun, etc.). But all move in the direction of increased entropy

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