• Question: how was 'time' created?

    Asked by chlopitts to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:


      Hi chlopitts,

      I think time was created by humans. When you think about it, time is completely un-needed apart from in our society, we are the only people who care how long something takes or when it happens or how many years ago it happened. Our natural body clocks are not actually in tune with our concept of time, they run slightly differently, so we have to force them to run how we want them to, as dicatated by time.

      So I think we made time. But it’s a great question, one that makes us all think!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 27 Jun 2012:


      Hi chlopitts,
      Measurements of time – hours, minutes and seconds, were invented by humans so that we could keep track of the passage of the day. The second used to be defined as 1/31,556,925.9747 th of a year (thank you wikipedia), although it’s now defined more accurately using atomic clocks.

      However, there’s no reason that we couldn’t have a different measure of time – like we have both centimeters and inches to measure length – completely different units for measuring the same thing. Perhaps you could invent your own, although I doubt your teachers would accept that as a good excuse if you were late.

      However, no matter how humans choose to measure time, we didn’t invent it. Einstein’s relativity theory links together both space and time – we couldn’t have a universe that didn’t have time: time is a fundamental dimension of the universe, just like we can move around in 3 dimensions of space, we move forward in the dimension of time. Both time and space were created at the beginning of the universe, the big bang.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 27 Jun 2012:


      I suppose time has always existed or there would be no difference between now and 1 year down the line. As both James’s have said we defined time and constrained it into months, weeks, hours, seconds etc so that we could separate up our lives.

      I expect it first started when people noticed the sun was visible and hidden for certain periods and this had a cycle they could define. Or that crops grew for a certain period of ‘time’ and they gave that period a name, and so on with the period when it was really cold became winter and this also had a cycle which they could define.

      Great question to get us thinking

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