[Bullet Magnet]

Okay, read my words carefully, because somewhere along the lines their meaning is being lost on you.

Time is a dimension. There are three dimensions of space through which we can freely move through (I'm not going to touch any of the others at this point). We know they exist: they are fundamental properties of the universe. You can't see them under a microscope any more than you can see the United States of America under a microscope. Each dimension is a right angles to each other, length, width and height. Take away one, and we end up in a two dimensional universe, the sort that you could represent on paper. A digestive tract could not exist in a two-dimensional organism because the tube from mouth to anus would bisect it in two.

Time is a fourth dimension, and it behaves differently to the others. Like the others, it is at right angles to the rest. Like the others, it has only two directions, forwards and backwards. Unlike the others, it is particularly entwined with something called causality, and we can only move along it in one direction, as if you has started your life at a great height and ended it at the bottom- there is no going backwards. You can imagine your life as a four-dimensional sausage, you foetal self at one end and your deceased self at the other.

Time exists. Clocks and other timepieces are tools used to measure our position and movement along the dimension. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. Time has elapsed with or without clocks to measure it. We did not invent time with the first clocks. If we had, we would have no history before that moment, because that would have been the beginning of time and therefore the universe. Reductio ad absurdum.

Hell, people kept track of time thousands of years before clocks and other tools were invented. They used the sun and the moon, whose passage across the sky and phases are relatively constant at the timescale human beings live their lives in.

Time is one of the few fundamental quantities in physics. Velocity, speed, momentum, acceleration and more, all require time to be a real, fundamental aspect of the universe. If time is nothing but a human invention, so too are these. And yet, this would imply that before we invented time the universe was in chaos: planets, stars, comets, galaxies and everything did not have momentum, would not have speed, nor velocity, they could not speed up or slow down. In such a universe, life would never have arrived to invent time. Not least because nothing could change, as I already explained, everything would be at an eternal standstill, where "eternal" refers to the only moment in existence. Reductio ad absurdum again.


Also, measurements do exist. In quantum physics the nature of the universe is altered by the act of measurement.