There is much talk of time in the science community as though it was a physical thing. There are even discussions of going backward in time, or the concept of time reversal. For example, there is a popular video that shows two billiard balls bouncing off each other, and when the video is played backward, it still looks as though the billiard balls are bouncing off each other. The point is that you cannot determine which running of the video was the “real” one. This is supposed to illustrate that time can extend in either a forward or backward direction. Or does it?

What this video illustrates is a mere snippet of what is occurring. If we view the earlier part of the video, we see the cue stick driving one ball into the other. If we view the latter part of the video we see the second ball being driven into the corner pocket (possibly). In other words, the video experiment is a bunch of hooey.

The real question is “What is time?”

The answer is simply that time is a human construct, it’s not a something:  it’s only an abstract idea. The sun rises and sets. The clock ticks and tocks with what we perceive as regular intervals.

Since the beginning of human history, we have thought about such events as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.  We noticed that the moon not only came into being and then disappear in what we perceived as regular intervals, but it has what we call phases that cycle on a regular basis. We found that water would drip through a hole in a clay vessel, again with regularity. We found all manner of regular events, and we termed this regularity time.

Over time (pun intended), we constructed all manners of instruments that measured time: clocks. As we became more efficient with clock construction we became more adept at creating smaller and smaller intervals between the ticks and tocks of our clocks. As the human race evolved, it developed a few advanced beings called scientists. These creatures are very adept at using abstract thought called mathematics to prove all manners of conjecture they can conceive of. And they are extremely interested in the thing called time. They ignore the fact that time is abstract, and hypothesize that not only might time go backward, but we might one day advance (or retreat) in time. And these beings are revered as geniuses of the highest caliber.

The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as time. It is an abstract, not a thing that we can attribute qualities to. Without stuff zooming around the universe in what we perceive as regular intervals, we cannot conceive of such a thing. Regular intervals are nothing more than the repeated comparison of events. The sun rises. The sun sets. This is not a thing. It is an abstract thought that we call a day. There is nothing we can do with a day other than spend it wisely.