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Random mental musings of a non-physicist after a bit too much coffee: I wonder if we're just playing at semantics and what "time" means to me is not what "time

Random mental musings of a non-physicist after a bit too much coffee: I wonder if we're just playing at semantics and what "time" means to me is not what "time" means to quantum physicists. Clearly events unfold in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind time like a movie and go back to exact events that have occurred in the past. But "time" defined as a fundamental force of the universe may be something entirely different, perhaps intertwined with quantum probability. Maybe this is how we'll eventually solve faster than light speed intergalactic travel. Instead of manipulating space, we'll manipulate time - i.e. travel to a point in time where we probabilistically exist at that location in space. Of course, once we get there, our perception of time moving in a linear fashion will "speed things up" to the current time as perceived by all of us.

leggomylibro 9y ago
>Clearly events unfold in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind time like a movie and go back to exact events that have occurred in the past. I know it's kind of facetious, but we can't flap our arms to fly either, and that doesn't mean that gravity unfolds in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind its direction. Things get a lot simpler if you don't believe in free will. Maybe you could observe the past or future through some experiment that we haven't figured out. But you also wouldn't be able to change it. It just is, like space. A lot of time travel fiction takes that sort of view; plot twist, all of the protagonists' efforts to change the future they saw actually wind up leading them straight to it. Gasp!