#jjsimon

What if time is not simply something that exists?

Modern physics increasingly suggests that time may be less like a universal river and more like a relationship between changing states.

Without change, what would time even mean?

Without memory, what would distinguish past from present?

Without awareness, would there be any experience of duration at all?

This doesn't mean humans create the universe.

Stars formed long before people existed.

Galaxies evolved long before anyone could observe them.

But it does raise an intriguing possibility:

Perhaps time becomes meaningful when change is registered, remembered, and compared.

Perhaps time is not only something we move through.

Perhaps it is something we help bring into experience.

If that's true, then understanding time may require understanding observers as well.

(You can respond in the notes if you picked the last option — I’d love to hear your reasoning.)

It sounds like a simple question.

Until you try to answer it.

We clearly invented clocks, calendars, and the systems used to measure time. We divided the day, defined the second, and refined precision.

But what those systems measure—the ordering of events, the unfolding of change—doesn’t feel invented.

It feels found.

Physics complicates this further. Time is not fixed. It stretches, bends, and shifts depending on motion and gravity.

And then there’s the human layer.

We don’t experience time directly. We experience memory, attention, and anticipation.

So time exists in multiple ways at once:

– as a feature of reality – as a system of measurement – as a structure of experience

Which means the real answer isn’t one or the other.

It’s layered.

And once you see that, time stops being something that simply passes...