Does Time Actually Exist? | Fat Dough Conversations #004
What the hell is time?
Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Years.
Humans invented all of these ways to measure time. But did we actually invent time itself?
Imagine someone living inside a completely sealed room.
No windows. No clocks. No phone. No sunlight. Nothing telling them whether it's morning or night.
Eventually, they might have absolutely no idea how long they've been inside.
But their hair still grows. Their body still ages. They get hungry. They sleep. They wake.
Things continue to change.
So did they lose time?
Or did they simply lose their ability to measure it?
That's where this week's rabbit hole begins.
Time Gets Weird
For everyday life, we behave as though there's one giant universal clock ticking away in the background.
Then Einstein came along and made everything considerably weirder.
Time isn't quite the same for everybody.
Motion matters. Gravity matters. In relativity, space and time aren't completely separate things either; we describe the universe using spacetime.
And then there's entropy.
Why can we remember yesterday but not tomorrow?
Why does an egg smash onto the floor, but we never see the pieces spontaneously reassemble themselves and jump back onto the table?
Why does time appear to have a direction at all?
And somehow... this rabbit hole gets even deeper.
A Cat, a Tree and the Universe
Eventually, we have to talk about Schrödinger's cat.
Don't worry.
It's a hypothetical cat.
From there comes another question:
What exactly does it mean to observe something?
Which leads naturally to that famous thought experiment:
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
And then we zoom out even further.
When we look at the Sun, we're seeing light that left it roughly eight minutes ago.
When we look at distant galaxies, we're seeing them millions or even billions of years in the past.
In a strange way, astronomy is archaeology with light.
We're never seeing the distant universe exactly as it is "right now."
Maybe the Clock Isn't the Problem
After Einstein, entropy, Schrödinger's cat, and the observable universe, this episode eventually comes back to something much more human.
We're constantly measuring our lives against time.
I should have succeeded by now.
I'm too old to start.
Everyone else is ahead of me.
I'm running out of time.
But who decided when our lives were supposed to happen?
Maybe living in the present doesn't mean pretending time doesn't exist.
Maybe it simply means stopping the constant measurement of our lives against it.
We need clocks.
We need calendars.
We need time to organize our lives.
Just don't turn the clock... into a scoreboard.
Listen to Episode 4
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Join the Conversation
Do you think time actually exists?
Or have humans simply invented ways to measure change and duration?
Let me know what you think.
Stay curious.
Daniel
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