There’s no doubt that time commands our everyday lives in many ways. Everything we do depends on time since most obligations have been structured based on the twenty-four hours of the day: the hours we work, the hours we rest or sleep, the times we’re allowed to do certain things (you’re not supposed to play loud music at two in the morning, for example), and so on. More importantly, our existence is controlled by time as well, since aging and eventually dying is directly intertwined with time as we perceive it. However, according to thinkers, scientists, and philosophers, the concept of “time” is a weird one, and the world of quantum physics that attempts to analyze it in greater detail is even weirder. The modern double-slit experiment—a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; and moreover, that it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena—attempted to explore the role of consciousness in shaping and influencing physical reality, illustrating even further how strange the concept of time is and how we might never manage to understand it using traditional logic. If this intro has not confused you enough. then feel free to read the following 25 Facts About Time To Mess Up Your Biological Clock. We can assure, these facts about time will make you reconsider a few things about “reality”.
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Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. To get an idea what a great variety of opinion there is keep in mind that Isaac Newton considered time to be absolute but according to Einstein time is more flexible and relative in scope.
Source:Wikipedia, Image: flickr.com, Photo by DonkeyHotey 24
The Soviet Union experimented with five- and six-day weeks between 1929 and 1931. Despite their agony to differentiate their social schedules from the West, the experiment failed miserably and the seven-day week was reinstated in 1940.
Source: soviet-empire.com, Image: Wikipedia 23
Artifacts from the Paleolithic period suggest that the moon was used to reckon time as early as six thousand years ago. Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, either twelve or thirteen lunar months (either 354 or 384 days).
Source: encyclopedia.com, Image: Wikipedia 22
A large variety of devices have been invented to measure time. The study of these devices is called horology. An Egyptian device that dates to about 1500 BCE, similar in shape to a bent T-square, measured the passage of time from the shadow cast by its crossbar on a nonlinear rule. The T was orientated eastward in the mornings. At noon, the device was turned around so that it could cast its shadow in the direction of the nightfall.
Source: Wikipedia, Image: Wikipedia 21
Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori intuition that allows us (together with the other a priori intuition, space) to comprehend sense experience. With Kant, neither space nor time are conceived as substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic mental framework that necessarily structures the experiences of any rational agent, or observing subject.
Source: plato.stanford.edu, Image: Wikipedia 20
However, an ancient Greek sophist named Antiphon was the first to describe time as an unreal thing. In a fragment preserved from his chief work On Truth, he held that “Time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure.”
Source: past-life-reincarnation.com, Image: Wikipedia 19
In Greek mythology, Chronos (not to be confused with Kronos, the leader of the first generation of Titans and father of Zeus) is identified as the personification of Time. His name means “time” and he is usually portrayed as an old, wise man with a long, gray beard.
Source: greekmythology.com, Image: Wikipedia 18
Normal years have 365 days but a leap year has 366. The Earth takes a little longer than 365 days to go around the sun so we add an extra day in February every four years (with a few exceptions) to keep calendars and seasons aligned. This year is a leap year.
Source: infoplease.com, Image: Wikipedia 17
The subjective perception of the passing of time tends to speed up as we age. Older people often complain that the years (and even the days) pass much more quickly than they used to. Various explanations for this common experience have been put forward with the most popular suggesting that younger people are still living through new and interesting experiences (rather than repeated and routine) that require more neural resources and brainpower.
Source: exactlywhatistime.com, Image: flickr.com, Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões 16
A temporal illusion is a distortion in the perception of time that occurs for various reasons, such as different kinds of stress. In such cases, a person may momentarily perceive time as slowing down, stopping, speeding up, or even running backward, as the timing and temporal order of events are misperceived. When we say that time slows down, what we actually mean is that our internal clock speeds up, which gives the impression that time in the rest of the world has slowed down.
Source: exactlywhatistime.com, Image: pixabay.com 15
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second . . . a long time compared to the femtosecond, the attosecond, and the shortest possible unit of time known as Planck time.
Source: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Image: pixabay.com 14
The oldest known object in the universe is a galaxy called z8_GND_5296. It’s 13.1 billion years old—only about six hundred million years younger than the universe.
Source: space.com, Image: Wikipedia 13
As for the oldest known object on Earth? It is a 4.4-billion-year-old piece of zircon that was found in Jack Hills in Western Australia. It’s only 160 million years younger than the Earth.
Source: nationalgeographic.com, Image: commons.wikimedia.org 12
Our sun is about five billion years old. The Earth is estimated to be 4,540,000,000 years old.
Source: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Image: Wikipedia 11
According to modern science, time is the fourth dimension. The first three dimensions are used to specify an object’s location or movement in space, while the fourth dimension locates its position in time. All four dimensions are used to specify completely the location or dynamism of an object in space.
Source: astronomytrek.com, Image: Wikipedia 10
Time has historically been closely related to space, the two merging together into space-time in Einstein’s special relativity and general relativity. According to these theories, the concept of time depends on the spatial reference frame of the observer, and human perception as well as the measurement by instruments such as clocks are different for observers in relative motion.
Source: einstein.biz, Image: Wikipedia 9
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests that before the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, space and time did not exist and matter was packed together in a tiny ball. Since time is measured by motion in space, there was no time without a moving cosmos.
Source: einstein.biz, Image: youtube.com 8
Stephen Hawking has addressed a connection between time and the Big Bang too. In A Brief History of Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there was another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect on the present time frame. On occasion, Hawking has stated that time actually began with the Big Bang, and that questions about what happened before the Big Bang are meaningless.
Source: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Image: commons.wikimedia.org 7
Cultural background affects our perception of time. Psychologist Robert Levine noted in his travels how people from the Middle East appeared to construe time differently from Westerners. Americans and Europeans think of time in five-minute intervals usually, while the Middle Eastern equivalent is the fifteen-minute interval. What this means in the real world, is that Westerners who wait on a friend for five minutes (one interval) and Middle Easterners who wait fifteen minutes (one interval) are actually waiting the same amount of time!
Source: exactlywhatistime.com, Image: commons.wikimedia.org 6
Because light takes time to reach us, the light we see is in the past. The sunlight you can see out the window is eight minutes and twenty seconds old. The light from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is four years old.
Source: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Image: pixabay.com 5
Due to tidal friction from the sun and moon, the solar day is lengthening by 1.7 milliseconds each century as the Earth’s rotation slows down. In other words, time on Earth is actually slowing down.
Source: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Image: Wikipedia 4
Like all good things in life, time will end one day as well. Physicists have calculated that time is likely to end within the next four billion years due to a catastrophe that no one alive at the time will witness.
Source: livescience.com, Image: deviantart.com 3
Time moves faster in the sky. This happens because the denser the gravitational field, the slower the passage of time. This means that a second at lower altitudes is actually nanoseconds longer than a second at higher altitudes—for example, when you fly on an airplane.
Source: dailymail.co.uk, Image: Wikipedia 2
A new study published in Nature Physics appears to show that time in fact may move backward and things may exist in multiple states. What could this mean? The future can affect and change the past.
Source: livescience.com, Image: Wikipedia 1
Lastly, keep in mind that there’s no such thing as “now” as far as physics is concerned. Space and time are fluid, affected by gravity and your speed. Einstein put it like this: “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
Source: physics-astronomy.com, Image: commons.wikimedia.org 
