Skip to content
Surprising Science

Timelesss Question

Time and it’s predecessor.
Sign up for Smart Faster newsletter
The most counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

I’ve been thinking about time and wondering how it could have a beginning. Time is necessary for motion, energy and change. Without it atoms, particles or vibrating strings wouldn’t move, in this or any other universe, regardless if time ran forwards, backwards, faster or slower. The passage of time is required for change, motion and energy. Which brings up the question of how it could start, the Big Bang happen and if time is eternal. Which raises the question of whether spece time and energy are also eternal.


If I could snap my fingers and freeze time, it would stop every atom in the universe, subatomic particle, including my own brainwaves, so nothing could ever change again.

In fact, there would be no energy, which is basically matter in motion over a period of time. No matter how you look at it, cosmology requires absurd assumptions or beliefs, with chicken versus egg parodoxes. Space, time, energy and matter are so interdependent it is hard to imagine one without the other, finite space or time.

And even infinity has degrees – Starting yesterday till the end of time is longer than tommorow till the end of time.

Starting in California, heading east out into the cosmos forever, vs starting in New York, heading east into the cosmos forever.

Sign up for Smart Faster newsletter
The most counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

Related

Up Next