I have always thought that time as an entity does not exist, but until now I have not had the clarity of thought to provide an explanation.

Time is a measure invented by humans to record the events of our lives, it is in effect a measure of change. Time is our way of capturing change in an abstract way that I do not think means anything in universal terms.

The change that I am talking about is the change of matter from one form to another and the movement from one place to another. This covers the life cycle of many things from plants through animals to the movement of the planets, but most importantly it is a measure of our lives.

I think it was Einstien who first suggested that time exists as a relative phenomenom and I think that the issues we have surrounding time are related to his theory of general relativity and something i'll call the universal tick (because i can't remember what he called it).

If there is a central clock to life, and everything is measured from that, you have a problem because not everything in the universe abidies by the tick of this clock, some things happen far to fast to be measured in these terms, and other things happen far to slowly, also two things happening in different places in space will experience diffrent times. To try and tie up all the rates of change of things under one banner is meaningless.

It is a better idea to give things in this universe their own specialised clock templates and from those each thing gets an instance of a clock. The ticks of each of these clocks relate to the rate of change of that thing and its position in the universe, we could imagine a heirarchy of clock templates relating to categories of thing.

The old ideas of tieing all rates of change to one tick and one clock gives rise to many problems which scientists over the years have tried to provide elaborate solutions for.

Time in my idea should just be a measure of things changing.

I feel that time features in the relm of modern physics as a three part deal. This is because it has to be a storage mechanism as well as a measure of change and a measure of space, hence the term spacetime. Time has to be likend to a giant tube of fabric that loops back on itself and will record all of the events that have happened in the fabric like a massive event matrix. Somehow at the end of time things resolve themselves and the universe will be in the same state as it's begining, and off we go around the loop again.

This fabric gives rise to many theories on how the universe is constructed, and even more elaborate solutions to problems of time such as time travel, but why scientists should believe that time is recorded on some dimension or other I do not know, perhaps it is linked to our whimsical dreams about what might have been in our lives.

Time is and abstraction of change, and change cannot be reversed in this universe. Falling water from a dripping tap can not be reversed and made to go back, babies can not be un-born, and people do not come back from the dead, ergo you cannot reverse time or do anything other than measure it.

God does not have a VCR.

The only thing that makes me think twice about this is the consciousness I possess, this is a unknown quantity that doesn't fit into modern physics and cannot be explained. I feel it is at an extreme end of physics which we cannot yet comprehend, and along with mystical/religious/paranormal experiences it has a place, so maybe time does as well.

On a related subject; modern physics supports the idea or spacetime expanding at an ever increasing rate, This is observed by measuring the light from near galaxies and far galaxies, and the the far ones are moving faster away from us than the close ones. What evidence is there for time speeding up also? I don't think there is any, but one interesting thought i had relates to the speed of ones life.

Everyone remembers that days were longer as a child than they are now and old people report that time passes even quicker for them. There are a million reasons for this in human biology, but could we be detecting the speeding up of our universe?

Clocks would be no good at showing this because they are measuring the expansion of time and will not show any difference between now and a hundred years ago. If consciousness is something static in the universe and is not directly related to our bodys then maybe it can pick up on this. What if a minute now is shorter than it was when I was born, what if my pop experienced a time that was slower than any i will ever experience, not by much but enough so that he noticed, what if time is increasing in speed exponentially...