Time begins with movement

Maya, about consciousness

By Rujjwal. A short reflection, about 3 minutes.

I've had an epiphany about time, one I feel I finally understand well enough to explain to someone else.

Time exists wherever there is a particle, or mass, wherever there is movement: vibration, angular momentum, motion of any kind. Time begins with that movement, and it ceases when all movement ceases, including thought and perception, subatomic vibrations, and the intrinsic motion inside particles themselves.

At the speed of light, a particle stops behaving like a particle and starts behaving like a wave. For something traveling at that speed, time itself seems to stop. No light or information could reach an outside observer either, so everything would appear dark, and all mass would convert to energy, exactly as Einstein described. No particle, no time.

Space, I think, can exist without time. But time cannot exist without space. Movement happens in space, and it's that movement which gives rise to time. So time comes woven into space from the very beginning, built into the intrinsic vibrations of particles at the smallest scale, and into every movement at the largest scale too.

No particle, no time. Space can exist without time, but time cannot exist without space.

This is also, I think, why gravity gets described as the fabric of space and time bending together, and why a black hole feels to me like an extreme version of something as ordinary as Earth: simply a place of far greater density.

This is my own way of thinking about time, shaped by ideas from physics I find beautiful, not a formal physics paper. I'd love to hear how it lands with you, and where you'd push back.

More about who's writing this is on the About page. If this got you thinking, or you'd push back on any of it, I'd genuinely love to hear it: sharma.rujjwal [at] gmail [dot] com.