What is time?

Time is one of the most enchanting concepts ever. From Einstien's elastic time, to existence of communities such as Amondawa and Piraha who live without a concept of time - I have always been itching to get to fundamentals of this seemingly real but still so abstract concept.

On thinking hard, the most correlated thing to time is change - and many a times a cyclic type of change. For ages, we have measured a day as a time between 2 sunrises, a month between 2 similar phases of moon and so. So we started from a point, started observing some gradual changes and then came back to original point. A cycle was observed and was tied in a word, in a quantity, in a unit of something thought as time. Another most used unit of time is  our age. It starts from birth (nothing), goes through a series of gradual changes and ends in death (nothing). Again a cycle, and the time of this cyclic journey is age. While from numerical perspective, age could be standardized, but from experiential perspective it is very subjective. Imagine 2 people living for same measured time, but not aware of concept of time as such. At the end if you asked them to quantify how long they lived. They might look baffled. They might quantify it to you in important events they did in life or in terms of how many sunsets they saw. Interestingly, if you think what is a duration of a sunset. It is an outcome of planetary settings and rules of gravitation. So time is nothing but in a way a manifestation of some laws of nature.

Imagine waking up in a closed dark room while it is 9 am outside. It will be close to impossible to guess the time. Just think of instances, when you get up in middle of night, and reach out to the watch to get a clue of what the time is. You won't.

Now compare this relatively fuzzy understanding of time, with our empirical understanding. In real life, we are used to see change as a product of time e.g. The plant will grow when 5 months pass away. In our empirical understanding, time passes first and the event is thought to happen as an outcome of it. Which one is really correct?

To answer this, I think 2 questions would be enough

a) Can time be measured without change - if it can be, then time is not dependent on change

b) Can change happen without time changing - if this is true then change is not dependent on time

Let's pick 'a - Can time be measured without change' first. I picked first 3 definitions of a 'second' (smallest unit of time used in daily life), and they seem to suggest that time can not be measured without a change:

i) The unit of time, the second, was defined originally as the fraction 1/86 400 of the mean solar day (A solar day is measured based on 'change' in position of sun)

ii) Definition of second is "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ('Change' in state of an atom)

iii) It is the time required for an electromagnetic field to propagate 299,792,458 meters (2.99792458 x 10 8 m) through a vacuum ('Change' in position of the field)

Now let's pick 'b - Can change happen without time changing'. In physical sense it obviously doesn't, but even in abstract sense, I couldn't think of an instance where change happens without time changing. 

Simple, so far? Now here is a twist to 'a'. Though time can't be measured without a change - It can still pass without anything changing for e.g. Through the night, while I was sleeping (not changing my state) - time still kept ticking. This brings us to concept of relative time. Time is linked to change in events, and there are multiple events happening around us at the same time, and moreover even same event can be perceived in different ways (you can watch a lightning for 1 ms, OR you can hear its sound for 1s OR you can just know its impact for 1 min --- Now a deaf guy who just saw the lightning far away from its impact will think it was 1 ms long, A blind person will hear the thunder and think it was 1 s long, and a deaf person close to impact will think it was 1 min long - all perceiving the same thing differently and of different times). So depending the event you choose, and way you experience it - you will feel a different time. Yes 'feel'.

So many times we say that time has passed so 'fast'. Or when on stuff like weed the time slows down. All this is because, at the core of it - Time is personal to you - it is subjective to you and your experience at that moment. You 'feel' the time. The clock that is running is just a standard of time chosen to communicate easily, like language - for e.g. in moments of elation you bypass the language and generally make sound and gestures to express; similarly empirical time might cease when you are in elevated states of consciousness. 

If you haven't found too much wrong with my reasoning so far, then we have established that time is subjective (depending on the event being experienced and the way it is being experienced). But this doesn't answer the question that what is 'time'? Telling you that Prateek is poised, doesn't tell you 'who is Prateek'. But before getting to my opinions on what time could be, it was very important to break the rigid and objective notion about time - the same concept that drove me towards my opinions. 

I feel that time is a thought / concept / invention to let life happen. Consciousness, started being conscious/thoughtful of sequence of events, and started building a basic version of memory - Leading to birth of time. It's very difficult to say this with certainty. But to me, time feels like a thought that connects multiple other thoughts and present them as coherent reality. It's that thread that weaves the flowers to give existence to a garland. To explain and understand this, we will have to take support of an abstract plane of reasoning and reality. All live things we know, have a life 'span' - and hence have a time. For life to be there - Time is a precursor. Moreover time is super powerful in the sense, that it is immortal or if more correctly put - is outside the framework of life and death. Why does it exist, How did it came into existence - are all bigger questions which I myself am trying to answer, and will probably need another blog post (My current take is that these questions do not exist in the framework where time exists, but to articulate those thoughts it's going to take an insane amount of effort). Will like to close all the confusion with the very famous narration from Mahabharata "Main samay hoon"