[joslin01]

Happy to see my passing thought "How can time be real?" is actually being given serious academic study.

If you take reality to be right here, right now (what else could it be?), time cannot exist, it just helps us map change.

[empath75]

It's been given serious scientific study for decades and there have been multiple pop-science treatments of it even.

And even well before that:

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present — if it be time — only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be — namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be?

—Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones lib xi, cap xiv, sec 17 (ca. 400 CE)

[Senderman]

This line of discussion causes, to me, funny quirks of logic.

"If you take reality to be right here, right now (what else could it be?)" - can't disagree!

But, after that, things start to get self-referential in tangled ways - "time cannot exist, it just helps us map change" - but 'change' requires time! And 'mapping' is a mental act that involves change!

I can't help but feel that if these apparent contradictions were ironed out, the answer to 'what is time?' would be close by.

[AnimalMuppet]

> If you take reality to be right here, right now (what else could it be?)...

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Shakespeare

[codeulike]

So how does change happen?

[joslin01]

One reaction at a time in a chain of reactions. If you lift your arm up, are you asking me how did that happen? Muscles fired to go from point A to point B. I'm confused by your question to be honest; are you telling me change occurs because of time? Or trying to tell me change depends on time? Then yes, but change is just a perspective as well. There's only ever going to be right here, right now.

[codeulike]

What I mean is, if there is only ever right here right now, that is a frozen timeless state, and how do you traverse from that to some other different state.

[goatlover]

> There's only ever going to be right here, right now.

Which means it's impossible to construct a wormhole to the past, since the past doesn't exist. But GR does theoretically allow for certain configurations of space to bridge different time frames.