Deep Mysteries of Time

This is an off the wall question just a thought I had really. We have no idea what time really is right? Also we know that matter cant be destroyed but rather it dissipates and recreates not all matter can be explained IE. dark matter. is it safe to say that time is really a coefficient in the change of matter? Like for the GUT theory if all forces come together but we don't what the last field is could it be time? Like i said its just a thought that i had but what if time was energy.
- Brandon (age 24)
TN

At some deep level we don't really understand what any of the basic ingredients are, including time.

It's unlikely that dark matter will turn out to be a particularly deep part of the whole story. Right now, the best guess is that it's just some stuff that we don't interact with very strongly, kind of like neutrinos but more massive. Grand Unified Theories also don't go so deep as to shed special light on time. Maybe a "Theory if Everything" (including quantum gravity) might.

"is it safe to say that time is really a coefficient in the change of matter?.... Like i said its just a thought that i had but what if time was energy." That actually gets pretty close to what quantum physics says. Energy just gives the rate of change of the quantum state, i.e. it's the time derivative, times "i" and some unit-dependent constant.  It's really only the product of the elapsed time and the energy that enters into the state change, not either one separately.  Noether's theorem says that energy must be conserved so long as the basic rules of physics don't depend on time. So time and energy are very closely related.

Mike W.

(published on 12/24/2013)