Time doesn't exist. (sort of)

[titan]

The past can't exist in the present, by definition. The past may have existed / occurred in the past, but it's over now. It does not exist right now.
The future doesn't exist. Can't. It hasn't happened yet.

That leaves the present, which actually is the infinitely thin interface between past & future. In fact, past & future define the present.

In our daily experience we can witness the hours pass by. But if the present is infinitely brief, not the past, not the future, then wouldn't an infinite number of consecutive "presents" be needed to comprise one second, a sixtieth of a minute?

 

[mark mywords]

time is the only thing that prevents every thing happening all at once

 

[sear]

Well mm, I like bumper-sticker slogans too. But let's bear in mind the mammalian underpinnings of the perspective.
Dogs, ostensibly domesticated canids seem to live more in the moment than adult humans. It helps explain the exaggerated separation anxiety they demonstrate when their owner leaves for work in the morning.
Common among humans is the concept of sequential time, 2 o'clock arrives an hour after 1 o'clock, etc.
But the closer we look, the more erroneous this perspective seems.

“Gravity slows down time … speed slows down time ...” Bob Berman

Experts, astrophysicists call it "space / time".

And if you'll indulge a little layman's ramble:
- some laymen may believe that while their own understanding of Newtonian physics may be incomplete, that scientists understand there's a set of rules by which the cosmos operates. But such laymen are WRONG.
Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant scientists in all human history, ably analyzed the physical world of our daily experience, and even identified 3 laws to help explain it.

BUT those scientific rules don't apply to either the micro, or the macro world. Quantum physics simply applies a different set of rules. And the reason I mention it here:
at molecular level, when an electron skips from one shell to another, scientists seem to think the transition is instantaneous, that there is no transitional condition. But that's from the perspective of evenly ordered sequential time. Might part of what makes quantum physics different be that at that scale space / time is different?

Astrophysicists stiff-arm Newton as well. I suspect a more realistic perspective on time might help smooth out the distinctions between these 3 separate, different standards of physics.