WELL? :blink:

Woo! Big question!

Can you have time without space? Can you have space without time? I'd say no to both questions so I think your question is "how does space-time come into existence" i.e. how did the universe appear. And the answer to this is commonly thought to be the Big Bang. Before this, there was no time and no space...

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Spike
:)

I disagree. I think space came into existence via the Big Bang, but time existed before that.

Time is a human construct. It came into existence when some human thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago invented it.

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The visions we present to our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. - Carl Sagan, 1992

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Can God make a bigger stone then he can lift?

" Time is just the rate of measure of something. The whole spacetime is one, time is not something different from space."

Something I don't understand. How do we feel time passing, then?
The question of how time came into existence is linked closely with what time is. And no one knows That.

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Limericks, written by me: http://limericker.blogspot.com

Maybe time doesn't pass. It's just us passing through time.

You can view time as just another dimension. The strange thing is that we can only move along this dimension in one direction and it's very difficult to alter the speed that we're moving.

The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Just like your south to north velocity reduces when you start moving more in an easterly direction.

Time is a bit like how you experience space when you're falling - if you jump off an aeroplace, you quickly reach a steady velocity through space. It's not easy to change this velocity and you can't easily travel in the opposite direction. But it's gravity that's causing this effect.

Maybe there's a time component to gravity that is dragging us along at 1 second per second?

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Spike
:)

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If God existed, science would be meaningless.

I read a theory once that may help you to understand (if it is correct). It does not directly answer your question im sorry but it may help a thinking process or two.

It said that the world as we know it is made up of 4 dimensions (Up + Down) (Left + Right) (Back + Forward) and Time. All of these components together must add up to the speed of light.

So, as we go about our daily lives at our comparitivly snail pace transport, our up/down, left/right, back/forward speeds are a fraction of the speed of light, so the time dimension is much more dominant that the others, hence our inability to do anything with it. As we approach the speed of light however, there is a much smaller piece of the dimensional pie for time to occupy, hence time appears to slow down for us travelling at near light speed, yet passes at normal slow pace for everyone else.

mmmmmm...... dimensional pie :P

Spot on, DC. We exist in four-dimensional space-time and every motion is a trade-off between space movement and time movement. The only reasons we don't see this directly is that we move slowly compared with the speed of light and we've evolved in a space-oriented environment.

Maybe there are alien species that live mainly in the time dimension and find it difficult to alter their motion through space.

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Spike
:)

now that is a bizzare concept to contemplate, to be able to move forward and back in time but inable to move your geometric co-ordinates!!

I think that this difference in time and spatial dimensions, that exists for us, needs an explanation.

Time is a part of the 4-dimensional spacetime, and A spacetime slack can be cut in a number of ways, each describing a unique kind of time. That is why it is rather better to visualise spacetime as a whole and not space and time differently.
Stepehen Hawking, in the no-boundary proposal, assumes that time becomes just another dimension of space. Maybe that is what really is the case.Maybe, fundamentally, there is no difference between space and time. But, in the proposal, the nature of time becomes normal as the universe moves out of it's quantum state. But maybe, two things can happen:

1) The no. of dimensions of spacetime that become time are chosen not by laws, but by symmetries. That is, like a ball on the side of a thin wall has to choose which side to fall on, the no. of dimensions of time just 'happen'. Maybe other universes have two dimensions of time, or more.

2) Maybe only we pass through time, and move in spacial co-ordinates, as sp1ke said. Maybe, the time doesn't become normal as the universe expands. Maybe it's just that we move through time ( and can't control it. Though I don't like tis scenario, as we can see everything forming, being destroyed, as 'time' goes on, maybe we are just used to seeing time pass this way. If we were aliens who moved through time instead of space, maybe we would be biased the other way.

My head is spinning.

That was me, forgot to log in.

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Limericks, written by me: http://limericker.blogspot.com

time, when dealing with one event, is hard to picture without relativity. However, when describing the same three-D location with respect to two different times, we can say the "time" elapsed is simply the difference between the two events. So either: this event happenned at 1400 hours on Tuesday, July 18, 2010; or: this event happenned two hours before/after such-and-such other event.

If nothing changed, there would be no measure of time.

Therfore time existes because space exibits change.

All points in space are also seperated by an interval of time, as developed by Special Relativity. so in this case the necessity for change is not so intrinsic to the measure or discribe time.

These leads to two meaures or dimensons of time. Relative time is the time interval between points. The other dimensions of time is the cornological summary of change. This is called Cosmic or Absolute time. It demarkates a points localtion historically in relation to the begining of time (which is assocaited with the Big Bang).

Snowflake

Exactly, Snowflake. Couldn't've said it better myself. B) You have my blessing.