Please someone explain to me how time is man made?

I don't get how some people say that time is man made.

it takes 24hrs for earth to rotate and a yr to revolve around the sun.

How exactly is time man made?

it's not people are just stupid and think that man created everything

ya but there must be some form of reasoning from this amount of people who claim this.

it's impossible that this many people think like this out of the blue

okay I got some research and i got this

Our concepts and organization of time are indeed manmade. We organize events into increments of time: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc. We then say that if something takes years, decades, or centuries, then it takes a long time.

Take the Universe for example. Events take place in extremely short amounts of time, and extremely long amounts of time (by human standards). Early events of the big bang, and the creations of subatomic particles, might have taken place within fractions of a second. On an atomic level, particles were beginning to take shape in the first trillion trillion trillionths of one second after the big bang!

To Mankind's standards, this is an absurdly short amount of time. But does this mean it happened in a short time on a Universal scale? No, in the Universe, it simply happened as it happened. If we remove the measurements of Mankind's time, then these early events might be categorized as taking a long time!

Now, lets look at things on a larger scale. Take the age of the Universe for instance. As of right now, the Universe has an estimated age of about 14 billion years. Again, when we apply it to Man's conception of time, the Universe is ancient! 14 billion years is a long long long time. However, does this really mean the Universe is old? Of course not, for all we know, it still has billions or trillions of more years to exist.

So, it all depends how you ask the question of time. According to Einstein, time should be a very real thing because it essentially exists along with Space in its own dimension, the 4th dimension.

Does this mean that time is perceived the same way for everything and everyone in the Universe? Not necessarily.
.

that just means that our lives are short compared to everything else just like a fly's life is short compared to a human's it doesn't mean that we created time it's just our prospective

Who knows what time is? who cares? To me time is just another way to measure our lives. Who knows, if there are other species in this universe they
could be measuring time in a different state. Time was probably invented long
ago to keep up with the seasons, and to harvest crops. As we evolved, so did
time. Now we have time on our wrists, on our walls, on our cellphones
and in our cars. So did we invent time? or was it always there?
The only way to tell is to build a time machine.

Time will still pass the same everywhere, only the measurement of it will change. An hour for us will still pass as an hour on an alien planet, except their name for it won't be an hour. They might not even have a name for it, as an hour for them might be insignificant. That hour will still pass though. Time isn't man-made, we just gave the measurements names.

Explained Here

I suggest you look at this thread, in particular at posts made by blue bird. It is a very long thread (18 pages!) and the subject is explored from many angles. There's a lot of psuedoscientifc nonsense posted on the thread along with the science, so you'll have to do some filtering.

My own view is similar to that expressed in this post on that thread.

For example, perhaps all of "time" is just one instance, however the only way in which we can percieve eternity is in a linear fashion.

[edit on 30-8-2007 by Astyanax]

I wouldn't say time is man-made but definantly related to observation. If there was nothing to percieve the passing of time would it exist? Sure the earth would still rotate around the sun but if there's no perception of a dimension does it exist? I would say not. Assume that there's a fifth demension out there somewhere now. We don't know about it do we? Is that because it doesn't exist or because we can't perceive it?

In our current society, time has a much different meaning because of the industrial revolution. Time was money, hence we have clocks, watches, and coffee to keep human minds geared toward production. If you research "time" for our current age, you'll note how the industrialists influenced our attention to it. It was a means of gauging one's production.

Of course time is manmade. Otherwise, everything would happen at once.

It don't take a genius to figure this out.

Time isn't man-made but mesurement of time is. I recon there should be seperate words for "the measurement of time" and "nature's way of making sure everything didn't happen at once".

Really time dosn't exsist because if we assume that "time" has been going on forever, and "time" is a measurement between two points, then you really can't apply it.

Kind of a complex issue but I hope you get the jist of what I'm trying to say.

Originally posted by hinky
Of course time is manmade. Otherwise, everything would happen at once.

Just as space is man-made, eh? Otherwise everything would happen in the same place.

It don't take a genius to figure this out.

Oh, I'm not so sure about that. I think your insight is quite original.

Time is a conceptualization. It has no existence of it's own. It is always measured by numbering events. We say that a minute equals so many oscillations of a crystal. Anything that takes a minute really takes so many oscillations of a crystal. If you accellerate the crystal to near light speed the oscillations slow down compared to those of a stationary crystal. That doesn't mean time dilated. It means the physical processes involved in the oscillations of the crystal were affected by the velocity of the crystal. "Time" has nothing to do with it. Time is not an existential entity. It is a conceptualization associated with the numbering system. Einstein is a tricky rascal, often misunderstood.

If you want to understand time and many other ideas about the universe you have to study philisophy. Going to science for an explanation of these things is about as useful as asking Captain Kangaroo about them. Science has a very checkered history. The attitudinizing in science is really quite pathetic when you look at it. Dumb as a bag of hammers comes to mind.

Study Berkely, Hume and the Madyamaka philosophers of Buddhism to get a clue. Science is like a fun hobby.

[edit on 31-8-2007 by ipsedixit]

What hammers are good for

Originally posted by ipsedixit
If you want to understand time and many other ideas about the universe you have to study philisophy.

Platonic forms, Cartesian dualism and solipsism, eh?

Aquinas's proofs of the existence of God and Zarathustra's announcement that God is dead? That kind of understanding?

How about 'Thou goest to woman? Forget not thy whip!' and similar pearls of philosophical wisdom?

Hegelian dialectics? Marx's fantasy economics? Rousseau's refusal to see what was in front of his eyes? Nagel pretending he understood what it was like to be a bat?

Oh no, you're a Berkeleian, aren't you. 'No reality outside the mind'. But that little theory needs the presence of God -- the ultimate unnecessary entity -- to make it work.

Philosophy is certainly an aid to thought, and thus to understanding. But understanding also demands knowledge, which philosophy cannot provide. Only science provides that, which is why it has superseded philosophy -- at least, it has superseded the kind of philosophy that refuses to take scientific knowledge into account.

Yes, I know I take a philosophical side in that last paragraph. I know what side it is. The scientifically-minded are quite often familiar with at least the rudiments of philosophy.

[edit on 31-8-2007 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
I don't get how some people say that time is man made.

it takes 24hrs for earth to rotate and a yr to revolve around the sun.

How exactly is time man made?

It only takes the earth 24 hours to rotate because man says it does. Time was a construct of man in order to measure change; whether that change be movement, decay, cycles of processes, whatever. Time is totally constructed by man.

I'm not against science and I appreciate what is has to offer us all. I just think that in giving ontological status to Time, science has blundered. In Einsteinian physics time is a kind of "doofer". It does for things that physics can't explain, like why a clock goes slower at a high rate of speed. That's a mystery, but it strikes me as primitive to suggest that the clock goes slower because "time dilates" and not because some as yet unexplained change in physical processes takes place.

If I put two sugar cubes on the table and took out a hammer and hit one of them with it and then went on to explain the condition of the struck cube by saying that it's "messiness" dilated, people would think that I was dumb, or putting them on in a humorous way. In the situation of the clock travelling at near light speed, science ignores the fact that accelerating a physical body like that is akin to hitting it with a hammer. They know that it's physical processes take longer, but instead of accepting that there is something about physical processes that they don't understand they say, "time dilated."

Let's suppose for a moment that time deserves ontological status, that it exists like any ordinary object. If time were a "substance" then in order for it to dilate or to change it's characteristics in any way it would have to be composed of parts that would be capable of reorienting relative to one another, like bubble gum that you can stretch back and forth. In the case of bubble gum, none of the parts of bubble gum are bubble gum itself. There is no such thing as "bubble gum itself". Similarly there is no such thing as "time itself".

Okay, you say. Time is a composite of some sort, capable of interracting with substances in a different way at different velocities as has been demonstrated in numerous experiments. That might be true, but in philosophy, it is considered prudent to avoid more complicated arguments in favour of simpler ones when there is no compelling reason to assume complexity. It makes more sense to assume an unexplained physical process than to pull time out of your top hat and say that it dilated.

Until science can put some "timestuff" in a petre dish and tell us what it's characteristics are, I've got to assume there ain't no time, no time dilation, no time travel, no Santa Claus.

And incidentally, anyone who thinks that science trumps philosophy is, to put it charitably, naive







[edit on 31-8-2007 by ipsedixit]

reply to post by ipsedixit
I’m no philosopher and I am agnostic about time, but let's talk.

Science, you say, has blundered by granting ontological status to time. Or, to put it in words a bagful of hammers might understand, science is mistaken in stating that time exists. But does 'science' actually say this?

It depends on the context. If you're talking relativity, you should be talking about spacetime, the continuum within which all events take place and which cannot be picked apart into separate components of ‘space’ and ‘time’ because they are different aspects of the same thing. Some physical theories, such as loop quantum gravity, suggest that all objects and events in spacetime are simply distortions of the continuum itself. This is considerably more subtle than flatly stating 'time exists’.

But in a Newtonian context -- that is, in the ‘reality’ apparent to our human senses -- ‘time' certainly 'exists’. It is the straightforward time of human experience. Its 'ontological status’ is not so much 'granted' as acknowledged -- because, as far as Newton (or anyone else) could tell at the time, time does exist -- night follows day, seasons change, the kettle boils dry and so forth. Unlike Berkeleian rationalists, natural philosophers take the world as they find it and attempt to explain what they find, space, time and all. These days, we call natural philosophers scientists.

This brings us to your statement about the relativistic concept of time dilation -- or 'dilatation' as they used to call it. You say it was devised to explain observed physical phenomena. Well it wasn't; Einstein started out by trying to resolve certain theoretical inconsistencies that arose when attempting to harmonize his explanation of the photoelectric effect with Maxwell's equations. Special relativity was his resolution of the inconsistency, first put forward in his 1905 paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Time dilation was a consequence of special relativity --a predicted, not observed effect. It was first experimentally observed by Ives and Stilwell around 1940 and has been confirmed numerous times since by experiment. So I'm afraid your suggestion that time dilation is a 'doofer' brought in to explain otherwise inexplicable experimental results is incorrect.

The rest of your post, the argument concerning the substantiveness of time, may equally well be applied to space, to the various physical constants that determine the form of the universe (do they have 'ontological status' or not?) -- or, as you helpfully point out, to bubblegum. This is the kind of tail-chasing that philosophical rumination is prone to when questions of ontology are discussed; the empiricism of science breaks the cycle by, as I say, taking the world as it finds it and working forward from there.

The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated everywhere around us. How many vaccines or microchips has philosophy produced? That's where science trumps philosophy: in the real world. Science moves forward; philosophers then race to catch up, either by assessing the philosophical implications of the latest scientific discovery and adjusting their ideas accordingly (which is laudable) or by saying 'Oh yes, Democritus pointed this out 2,400 years ago, so we philosophers know all about it already' (which is rubbish).

You say you are not against science and you appreciate what it has to offer. I am certainly not against philosophy. I find it fascinating in itself and also of great practical use in teaching ratiocinative skills. But when it comes to determining what is, rather than what might be, philosophical speculation gets us nowhere.

Time is the measurement of one state to another just like a ruler measures space. It's the measurements that are man made, the rest is natural. IMO.

time in general is a natural process, however the measurement is not natural.

the measurement we currently use, has 6 as a base number.

366 days = 1 year
EDIT: meant to add that this was probably the accepted number in old ages.
1 year = 12 months
1 month = 30 days(on average)
1 day = 24 hours
1 hour = 60 minutes
1 minute = 60 seconds

i cant remember where i heard it, but the number 6 was thought to be significant in ancient times and a system was conceived to use that number.

the above would be entirely different if a different number had been favored.

thats the proof "time" is man made.(the measurement)




[edit on 2/9/07 by Glyph_D]