What is your reality of time?
TIME. What is it? According to physicists time is the progression of events from past to present and can be considered to be a fourth dimension of reality being perceived in the three dimensional space.
What does that even mean? A dimension is a degree of freedom of a system, also put, it is the number of ways or direction in which change can take place within a system. For example: You draw a stick figure and a line underneath him, for the grass or road. The stick figure, in theory, can only move left and right. It has no ability to move forward or backward. One dimension is one degree of movement. Say now we drew the stick figure but not just on one line, but gave some depth and put him on top of a pizza (for fun I know). Now the stick figure dude can move left, right, forward and backward, two dimensions. The third dimension, draw the stick figure with a jetpack on his back in a detailed scene of hills and water, the sky, trees all around him. The stick figure guy can move left, right, forward, backward, up and down now, making three dimensions. Now, onto the fourth dimension. From my understanding and doing research on the subject, time is the fourth dimension. Without it, physicists would describe our world to be in a static state. As the saying goes, “Time would stand still.”
Time was not started with the sequential past-present-future. It has been argued for over centuries between science and religion on whether it happened with the Big Bang (or even before that theoretically) or on the fourth day of creation from God. Which ever your belief, time is here. It is now. It is the past and the future.
Time is not a tangible thing but yet we abide by the ruling of the passage of it. Twenty-fourhours, not a second more or less. Throughout our history many cultures use an anthropomorphized depiction known as Father Time to represent the oneway passage of time. Looking through the interwebs, I found that the depiction of Father Time orginated from the Greeks and Romans. From what we know today, Father Time is an elderly man with a white beard, no hair on his head, sometimes wearing an ivy or garland crown on his head, trenched in a dark cloak and holding a harvesters scythe or sickle. However, throughout Ancient Greece and Rome, Father Time appeared to be younger and more spry.
The Ancient Greek word for time is chronos; at the same time the “Titan of Agriculture” name was Chronos. Over time the two would meld into one and now Chronos was known to be the King of Titans and Father of Time. When the Roman empire took over Greece, their religions, rituals and mythologies fused together. The Romans viewed their own ancient God, Saturn, to be like Cronos. Saturn ruled over agriculture and time, as well as wealth and renewal and also carried a scythe or a sickle.
You might be thinking that Father Time seems close to the depiction of the Grim Reaper, known as death. However, they are not one in the same, even though after time goes a long way, death will follow along. Would that be true if the fourth dimension didn’t exist? Time would stand still after all.
“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
- H.G. Wells
onder
