Dear All, I've read the recent postings regarding the nature of time and have been itching to have my two penny worth. Mention has been made of Steven Hawking's book, the jist of which is that time is inextricably linked with space. It was nice to see, therefore, someone's rapid response "Space stops everything happening in the same place" to the posting that "Time stops everything happening together"!
Strictly speaking, time only makes sense when considered with space. This makes questions like "What was there before the Big Bang" meaningless! Until the universe was created there was no time!! Slightly off theme (and to draw attention away from the fact that I'm not about to attempt my own definition of time), I read a book containing a number of papers by eminent scientists, one of which was by the physicist Richard Feynman. In it he argued that time need not only go in one direction! Apparently, there seems to be nothing about the physical process that isn't reversable. In a way that's fair enough since if time did change direction for a while, our memories would be undone in the process. It may be that time ebbs and flows and that we are just on a particularly large flow at the moment! And remember, "If we knew for some instant the position and velocity of all the particles in the universe, the rest of time would just be a matter of doing the maths..." David Higgon London