Does time exist?

This is perhaps the greatest epiphany of my life.  The moment I realized how to neatly summarize my understanding of the science I was learning: Time does not exist.

Of course, this is just an interpretation, and a personal one.  It may not be true but in it's defence I assert it is consistent with many physicists' view of the world (though they may put it a different way).  It may not even make sense to ask whether it is true or not: what does it mean to say that a thing we don't understand, and haven't clearly defined, doesn't exist.  But like a lot of ways of thinking about reality, the real question is: Is this helpful?

The things we know exist in the world can be divided into two categories: those for which we have direct evidence, and those for which we have indirect evidence.  In the former category we have light, sound, touch, smell; in the latter planets, atoms, and waves.  Time also belongs to the latter category.  We think about the future when we are preparing to catch a ball, but we don't experience it: we're merely imagining a scene (in this case catching a ball).  Likewise, when remembering the past we are not directly experiencing it.  What we directly experience is due to accessing memories - structures in the brain - right now in the present.  Time is a phenomenon for which we have only indirect evidence.

Evolution in time and space of wave packet generated with Schrödinger wave equation, from: Thomas, Gerald & Sabelli, Hector & Kauffman, Louis. Biotic patterns in the Schrödinger equation and the evolution of the universe.

 

If we take the Schrödinger equation seriously it leads us to the conclusion that each moment is constantly splitting into a superposition of versions characterized by minuscule differences.  (So far so good, all of Physics is still on board at this point.)  As time progresses these minuscule differences accumulate leading to a future that can characterized as a superposition of macroscopically different natures: different countries existing, different children being born.  (And now I've lost half of the Physics community!)

The natural question everyone asks when I tell them this is how I think the world works is: Yes, but if time forks into parallel universes then which one will I be in?  Of course, this question does not make sense - the situation is completely symmetric - so we have to think about it in another way: either a) they are all you, or b) they are none of them you.  This is where perhaps there is no correct answer, these are just different ways of thinking about the same thing.  If you choose option (a) you have to ditch any sense of discreteness and think of yourself as an infinite family that is continuously growing.  Personally, I find option (b) easier to conceptualize: that none of these future-people are me because I am here and I am now.

In this view of the world, there is no single parameter "time" that controls how the universe evolves, and no single path along which it evolves.  The universe is just a collection of moments.  Some of these are "future-like" - with respect to this moment that is - and some are "past-like".  But the vast majority are neither: they are future-like with respect to some moment in our shared past, not this moment.  And, like the universe as a whole, we are not creatures that flow through time, maintaining an integrity as we do so, rather we live in a moment and for a moment, but share a subset of our memories with various other characters that live in other moments.

In my view of the world time does not exist.  Of course, time was never properly defined in the first place, so you are free to assert that it does exist without disagreeing with anything in this argument.  For example, you could say that it exists, but it is infinite dimensional rather than one dimensional.  For me, however, the reality I believe in is so different from the classical one in which our concept of time was born, that it is easier to do away with the concept altogether.