“Maybe Time Doesn’t Even Exist”
July 22, 2015 - As chief time scientist at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Demetrios Matsakis has spent his career monitoring time, including making sure that the Navy's master clock is always right. Over the years he's developed some interesting theories about time—and whether it even exists.
Transcript
Time with Demetrios Matsakis
Chief Time Scientist
U.S. Naval Observatory
What is time? That's something that many people think they know the answer to, they have written books about it. I'm not convinced by any of those opinions and I do wonder about it.
The Earth's rotation is effected by many things, the tides represent the oceans attempting to follow the moon, and when they hit the sea shore it acts like a brake and that slows down the Earth over geological time. We can infer that in the dinosaur days the day was only about 20 hours long, now we're 24 hours long, in the future we're going to be longer still.
There's no such thing as a perfect clock, every clock has its own irregularities, but we don't have to be victim to those regularities, we can correct for them and by combining clocks we can get better time than any one clock, and more robust time.
I've never liked to carry watches, I don't really want to confine my concept of time to the measurement. If I'm too obsessed with the measurement, I could lose track of the big idea, and also lose track of my own innate sense of time.
One of the things that impresses me most about this is the finiteness of time. Is time just a coordinate, that we use to do things, that maybe time doesn't even exist? Maybe time starts and then we'll have an end of time. What does it mean? How is time related to infinity? I don't have the answers, I do wonder about them though.
