HOW DOES TIME WORK ?

How does time works

You may want to sit down to read this feature. when considering time, It’s easy to quickly get lost in the complexity of the topic . Time is all around us, ever present, and is the basis of how we record life on Earth. It’s the constant that keeps the world , the solar system and even the universe ticking. Civilizations have risen and fallen, stars have been born and extinguished, and our one method of keeping track of every event in the universe and on the Earth has been comparing them to the present day with the regular passing of time. But is it really constant ? Is time really simple as a movement from second to the next ? We’re about to find out.

13.7 billion years ago the universe was born, and since then time had flown by to the present day , overseeing the creation of galaxies and the expansion of space. But when it comes to comparing time, it’s daunting to realize just how little of time we've actually experienced. The Earth might be 4.7 billion years ago , but we modern humans have inhabited it for no « You would have to relive your life 150,000 times  just to match the age of the youngest known star in the universe »
More than 400,000 years, just 0.003% the age of  the universe. Feeling small yet ? It gets worse. You've experienced so little time on the Earth that in astronomical terms you’re entirely negligible. You would have the relive your life 150,000 times  just to match the age of the youngest known star in the universe.

In the 17th Century Newton saw time as an arrow fired from a bow , travelling in a direct straight  line and never deviating from its path. To Newton, on second on Earth was the same length of time as that same second on Mars, or Jupiter, or in deep space. He believed that absolute motion could not be detected, which meant  that nothing in the universe had a constant speed, even light. By applying this theory he was able to assume that, if the speed of light could vary, then time must be constant. Time must tick from one second to the next, with no difference between the length of any two seconds. This in something that you probably think to be true . Every day has roughly 24 hours, you don’t have on day with 26 and another with 23. However, in 1905, Einstein asserted that the speed of light doesn't vary, bit rather it was a constant (roughly  299,782,458 meters per second). He postulated that time was more like a river, ebbing and flowing depending on the effects of gravity and space-time. Time would speed up and slow down around cosmological bodies with differing masses and velocities, and therefore one second on Earth was not the same length of time everywhere in the universe. This posed a problem. If the speed of light was really a constant, then there had to be some variable that altered over large distances in the universe expanding and planets and galaxies moving on a galactically humongous scale, something had to give to allow for small fluctuations. And this variable had to be time.

It was ultimately Einstein's theory that was not only believed to be the truth, but also proved to be entirely accurate. In October 1971, two physicists named Hafele and Keating set about proving its validity. To do this, they flew four caesium atomic clocks on planes around the world, eastwards and then westwards. According to Einstein's theory, when compared with ground-based atomic clocks (in this instance at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC), Hafele and Keating's airborne clocks would be about 40 nanoseconds slower after their  eastward trip and about 275 nanoseconds faster after travelling west, due to the gravitational effects of the Earth on the velocity of the planes. Incredibly, the clocks did indeed register a difference when travelling east and west around the world, about 59 nanoseconds slower and 273 nanoseconds  faster respectively when compared to the US Naval Observatory. This proved that Einstein was correct, specifically with his theory of time dilation and that time did indeed fluctuate throughout the universe.

Newton and Einstein did agree on the thing, thought that time moves forward. So far there’s no evidence of anything in the universe that is able to dodge time and  move forwards and backwards at will. Everything ultimately moves forward in time, be it at a regular pace or slightly warped if approaching the speed of light. Can we answer why time ticks forwards, though ? Not quite, although there are several theories as to why it does. One of these brings in laws of thermodynamics, specifically the second law. This states that everything in the universe wants to move from low to high entropy, or from uniformity to disorder, beginning with simplicity at the Big Bang and moving to the almost random arrangement of galaxies and their inhabitants in the present day. This is known as the ‘arrow of time’, coined by  British astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1927. He suggested that time was not symmetrical, stating :  « if as we follow the arrow we find  more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future ; if you were to observe a star in almost uniformity, but later saw it explode as a supernova and become a scattered nebula, you would know that time had moved forwards from equality to chaos.

Another theory suggests that the passage of time is due to expansion of the universe. As the universe expands in pulls time with it, as space and time are linked as one, but this would mean that if the universe were to reach  at theoretical limit of expansion and begin to contract then time would reverse, a slight paradox for scientists and astronomers. Would time really move backwards, with everything coming back to an era of simplicity and ending with a « Big Crunch » (as opposed to find out, but we can postulate on what we think might happen.

It’s incredible to think of the progress we have made in our understanding of time over the past century. From ancient sundials to modern atomic clocks, we can even track the passing of a second more closely than ever before.

Time remains complex topic, but thanks to scientific visionaries, we are getting closer to unlocking the secrets of this not-so-constant universal constant.