This article was written after a friend and I had an interesting conversation about this topic.
What is time? Why does our life revolve around it? And why are we always running out of it? These are just a sample of the questions we ask ourselves at some point or another in our lives.
No one actually knows WHAT time is. Is it a physical or an abstract concept? Is it man made? Can it be controlled or are all the movies we watched in our youth just as they were advertised… Science fiction?
We are not Scientists or students of science; we are just regular guys with a lot of time in our hands (pun intended).
Many scientists tried to define time into something we human beings can grasp, and we have come up with some of our own theories. We understand that people may have come up with similar theories before us, but we simply came up with these while thinking logically and asking questions a normal person would.
One of the conclusions we came to is that Time is somehow connected to Motion.
I bet you’re thinking “how the hell?!” but we promise that we will give you our thoughts on this and you decide if it makes sense to you or not.
In movies when time is stopped, have you noticed that everything stops moving? Why is that? Why does everything stop moving when time stops? Even though these are just movies, the idea is still valid and supported by scientific theory.
Motion is more than just moving objects. Motion is everything; it is the change of something from one state to another. Even if you stop moving right now, every cell in your body is still moving and still “changing” therefore we are never completely still at any given moment, and that also applies to any object around us.
Proof that motion is constant is decay. Old buildings are called “old” for a reason. For example, if an exact replica of the White House was built, it would be identical to the old one in every way; the position of windows, doors and even position of every brick. However, the existing one is not the same as the newly built replica because it was in “motion” for longer, meaning some parts of it have worn out because of decay. That tells us that motion is present in inanimate objects as well.
Now what will happen if we stopped motion completely? Can motion even be stopped?
As we learned when we were younger, objects can generally exist in three states; liquid, solid and gas. In school we were taught this concept with an experiment with water. Water is a liquid that can be frozen or be turned into gas. Growing up we learned that ice can even be frozen further. In fact, the coldest any object can get is -273.15°C, or zero degrees in the Kelvin scale, which is also called “absolute zero”. It is called absolute zero because it is the coldest anything can possibly get; therefore in this state there is no movement at any level.
Basically this means that anything frozen at this level will stay the same…forever? Does this mean it is literally frozen in time? Theoretically… yes. From the point of view of that object, time has frozen, and that is one way of proving that time is motion. This concept of freezing “time” is used in cryogenics, where a human being is frozen to the point where no cell in their body is moving: Zero motion. That means their bodies are not growing, decaying or aging for that matter (technically speaking, that is one way to time travel). However, in reality, Cryogenics is mainly used to freeze people with incurable diseases so that they can be unfrozen when the human race is at a point in their technological advancement where a cure was discovered. Currently there is no way to unfreeze them so even if a cure to their disease were to be discovered, the human popsicles might have to wait for longer than necessary.
What if this absolute zero concept could be applied in a larger scale, say… The universe??
Would time be stopped? Because time is a concept appreciated by the whole universe, and now everything is frozen in a state where nothing is changing and time does not apply. The problem with this theory is that there is no way to find out. We’re not talking about the fact that it is impossible to freeze the universe, because that is obvious… we’re saying that EVEN if we could freeze the universe somehow, no one would be able to tell if time did stop or not, because everything is frozen and there is nothing in the universe to obverse the results of this experiment and, to our knowledge, there is nothing outside the universe (the observable universe or otherwise). For all we know this has happened before and we just don’t remember.