[Editorial note about the Editor-in-chief:  Dr. Siepmann is an expert in timing technology having written numerous articles about it, having several patents pending in the field, and by heading the R&D department of LightTime which has developed and is refining the use of light for the purposes of measuring time.  He has been written about this subject quite often for both the national media as well as the scientific community.  We are indeed fortunate to have him volunteer his "spare" time to the Journal of Theoretics.]

Why Time does not Exist

The concept of time is probably the most misconstrued and misused concept in science.  Most scientists as well as the public think that “time” actually exists, just like the physical dimensions of length.  Some have gone so far as to even give these “particles of time” the name “chronons.”  Many of the so-called reputable journals even publish articles by these ignorant practitioners of voodoo science.

You should have heard the gasps from a presentation on time to a group of scientists when I told them that time did not exist.  It was like I had blasphemed their sacred religion.  Let me try to explain the concept of time so that you can go forth and spread the factual truth to those with open minds:

The concept of  “time” is actually quite primitive with early man recognizing that their were repeated cycles of natural events which could be used to measure the duration of other events.  From the recognizing that the four seasons were such a repetitive cycle, to that of a cycle of day/night, which we later came to understand was one revolution of the Earth about its axis.  Then came the falling of sand in an hourglass to the repetitious swing of a pendulum, and currently to the oscillation of a quartz crystal. 

From all of these definitions of a “unit” of time, we have been able to artificially divide it.  The most basic subdivision is that of a second which is 1/3600 of one revolution of the Earth, which we have most recently defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium - 133 atom.  The smaller the repetitive natural event that we can measure, the more accurate our measurement of time can be.

But in all of this where is Time as a physical entity.  Nowhere.  All we have done is to define the duration of a physical event.

Einstein really screwed up most everyone’s perspective with his erroneous use of time and reference (the subject of my next editorial).  After his Theories of Relativity, everyone thought they could go and measure time like one would measure the length of a box with a yardstick.  I’m not saying that the concept of time does not have a purpose in the measuring of a single event by comparing it to the number of repetitive cycles of a naturally occurring event (i.e. the time it takes me to run a 40 yard dash to the number of quartz oscillations in my stopwatch).

Then how can time work in Einstein’s formulas.  It works in the same way that gravity does.  Neither gravity (or its “gravitons”) nor time (or its “chronons”) exist as discrete entities.  Gravity is nothing but the reactive force from Space to its displacement by matter.  Likewise Space and its density cause what we see in the relative variations of the duration of these repetitive naturally occurring events.  The more dense that Space is, the slower time is.  This is why time slows down as gravity increases.

If one really needed a true concept of time, the best that I could give would be the linear duration of the lifecycle of the universe.  This would be the only true time absolute that is not affected by the density of Space, as all time in this universe would have the same starting and ending point.  Any subdivision would therefore be allowable.  The problem is that we being the ignorant mortals that we are do not know the duration of the universe’s lifecycle (someday with better technology and theory we can do so based upon the expansion and contraction rates).

Therefore the best definition of time using its current understanding would be:   “Time as a physical entity does not exist but we have utilized this concept to make relative comparisons of event durations to that of repetitive and reproducible naturally occurring cycles or subdivisions thereof.”  But I would like to take time beyond that to my practical definition of time.

What is the only true constant in this universe besides its lifecycle?  The speed of light of course.  Time can be easily defined as, “The duration that it takes a photon to travel a preset distance divided by the speed of light.”  The smaller that we can define the distance that a photon travels, the smaller the unit of time that we can measure.  With this definition, there is virtually no limit to how infinitesimally small of a unit that we can measure.  Also we are not limited by using repetitious natural event for our measurement.

In summary, time as a physical entity does not exist, rather it is a means for comparing the duration of an event to the duration of another which is considered the reference standard.  Optimally, this reference standard should be the duration that it takes light to travel a preset distance, as this would finally make sense out of our reference standards as we would have the same definition for distance and time:  t=d/c and d=c/t.*

James P. Siepmann

*Though NIST currently uses the standard of d=c/t for the meter, it has alas failed to make the next logical step of using the same concept for time (t=d/c).  Maybe someday they will listen…