Killing Time

by ©2010 Daniel L. Burnstein all rights reserved

The greatest problem with current physics theories is that they consider time, a concept which has no reality outside the minds of human beings, as if it were a property of physical reality (see Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics).

Time is a relational concept which is made to allow us to compare events with periodic and cyclic systems; in other words, clocks. But time has no more effect on reality than the clocks that are used to measure it. In fact, when you think of it, clocks don’t really measure time.

Take an event consisting of the fall of an object from a point to “a” to a point “b”. When we say we measure the time it takes for that event to happen, what we’re doing is start counting the number of cycles (seconds, or fraction of seconds for instance) when the object is dropped from “a” and stop the count when it reaches point “b”. So we don’t actually measure time. What we do is simply count the number of cycles the clocks mechanism goes during over the course of the event.

Time is not a property of physical reality. Time is a relational concept, a useful relational concept I admit, but only a concept. Yet time, physicists will argue is necessary. Every process, every event, transformation or phenomenon happens in time. Without time, they affirm, the Universe would be static. Worse, there would be no Universe at all. What they fail to understand is that affirming the necessity of time is like saying that the atoms in the Universe could not exists without the number systems we use to count them. Their argument is akin to the solipsistic argument that reality cannot exist without an observer (which is something many quantum-physicists actually try convince us of).

So let’s make things clear for a start. Planet Earth, the solar system, our galaxy, our Universe existed before there were people to observe them and before the concept of time, which is a construct of the observers, was invented.
So time is a concept, which essentially means that there is no physical interaction between a phenomenon and the number of cycles of the periodic system we may compare it to.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say there is no interaction between the phenomenon and the periodic system. What I said is that there is no interaction between the phenomenon and the abstraction that is a number. That said, there is a very simple test to determine if a notion is a property of physical reality or if it’s merely a concept. The test is one of necessity.

For the sake of argumentation, let’s assume that time is a fundamental property of physical reality. If time is a fundamental physical property of reality, then the existence of time must be an axiom essential to any theory of physical reality. What this implies is that it should be impossible to describe any physical phenomenon without the use of time.

But then, we have quantum-geometry dynamics’ principle of strict causality which proves that any physical phenomenon can be described as sequence of events related through causality without any need for the concept of time (see relevant chapters of Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics).

Then, if time is not an essential axiom, it follows that time is not a fundamental property of physical reality. As a consequence, time is nothing more than a relational concept.

For those of you are interested, QGD provides a definition for speed that is not a function of time (see relevant chapters of Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics).