Long Burn

Time

A friend wrote to me, Time is a strange thing. It comes to you and bundles instead of in single quanta. Now, how is it possible to understand this in a quantum mechanical context?

And like any good student who doesn't know the answer to the question I started to dither:

Time: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future, regarded as a whole.
-Oxford English Dictionary

Time: A non-spatial linear continuum wherein events occur in an apparently irreversible order.

Although sitting next to a pretty girl for an hour feels like a minute, placing one's hand on a hot stove for a minute feels like an hour.
-Uncle Albert

The smallest possible measurement of time is the Planck time, 5.391 x 10^-44 seconds = (h_bar*G/(c^5))^0.5, the time it takes a photon to travel the Planck length. The universe has existed for 8 x 10^60 Planck times. In our universe, by the end of one Planck time, all four of the fundamental forces were unified and elementary particles did not exist.

posted by Matt_J @ 3:59 PM