Quotes About Time

It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future.

To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

Le cose si trasformano l'una nell'altra secondo necessità e si rendono giustizia secondo l'ordine del tempo.

the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself.

Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

The expanded present is the set of events that are neither past nor future: it exists, just as there are human beings who are neither our descendants nor our forebears.

What we call "time" is a complex collection of structures,2 of layers. Under increasing scrutiny, in ever greater depth, time has lost layers one after another, piece by piece. The first part of this book gives an account of this crumbling of time.

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"?

Even the distinction between present, past, and future thus becomes fluctuating, indeterminate. Just as a particle may be diffused in space, so, too, the differences between past and future may fluctuate: an event may be both before and after another one.

Happy and master of himself is the man who for every day of his life can say: "Today I have lived; tomorrow if God extends for us a horizon of dark clouds or designs a morning of limpid light, he will not change our poor past he will do nothing without the memory of events that the fleeting hour will have assigned to us.

Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall.

The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat.

Thus, it is possible to measure time by simply counting the oscillations of a pendulum. It seems such an obvious idea, but it took Galileo to find it; it had not occurred to anyone before him. So it goes, with science.

Despite certain obscurities,

Newton asserts explicitly in his book that we can't ever measure the true time t, but if we assume that it exists, we can set up an efficient framework to describe nature.

Solen böjer rummet runt omkring sig och jorden kretsar inte kring den för att den vore dragen av en gåtfull kraft, utan för att den rör sig rakt fram i ett rum som böjs.

Whenever you consider a phenomenon certifying the passage of time , it is through the production of heat that it does so. There is no preferred direction of time without heat.

But on the moon, the duration of the "extended present" is a few seconds, and on Mars it is a quarter of an hour. This means we can say that on Mars there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter-of-an-hour of events during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.

Einstein predicted that time passes more quickly high up than below, nearer to Earth. This was measured and turned out to be the case. If a person who has lived at sea level meets up with his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older than he. And this is just the beginning.

the "singularity" that classic general relativity anticipated disappears as soon as we take quantum gravity into account.

It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things. LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura1

Non c'è più lo spazio che «contiene» il mondo e non c'è più il tempo «lungo il quale» avvengono gli eventi. Ci sono solo processi elementari dove quanti di spazio e materia interagiscono tra loro in continuazione. L'illusione dello spazio e del tempo continui attorno a noi è la visione sfocata di questo fitto pullulare di processi elementari.

Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time.