What if Everything Happened at Once?

[Zinjanthropos]

Thinking that time would not exist and AI confirms this when asked. So then, time must allow for the sequence of events but what allows time? Thinking then that time has a barrier or can be turned off/on and in order for time to exist then there must be a scenario and a mechanism that permits it. Don’t have much to offer except to pose a question to AI related to this subject .

Does the speed of light prevent everything from happening at once?

    Yes, the finite and constant speed of light is the reason why everything does not happen at once from our perspective and prevents the concept of a single, universal "now". The speed of light is the maximum speed at which information can travel through the universe, creating inherent delays in how we perceive events.

Here is a breakdown of how this works:

Finite Speed of Information: Light (and all other information) takes time to travel from one point to another. For example, light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, so we always see the Sun as it was eight minutes ago. If the speed of light were infinite, information would travel instantly, and everything would be perceived as happening immediately.

Relativity of Simultaneity: Albert Einstein's theory of Special Relativity demonstrates that whether two distant events are "simultaneous" depends entirely on the observer's frame of reference and relative motion. Observers in different locations and moving at different velocities can legitimately disagree on the order or timing of events. This is not merely a perceptual delay, but a fundamental aspect of the geometry of spacetime itself.

Time Dilation: The speed of light is a universal constant for all observers. For this to be true, space and time must be relative. As an object's speed through space increases, its movement through time slows down relative to a stationary observer (time dilation). This effect means that a "universal time" is not a valid concept.

A Photon's "Perspective": For a massless particle like a photon traveling at the speed of light, time does not pass at all in its own frame of reference. From the moment it is emitted to the moment it is absorbed, the journey is instantaneous for the photon itself. It essentially connects two points in spacetime as if distance and duration do not exist for it.

In summary, the speed of light acts as a kind of cosmic speed limit that structures the flow of time and the causal relationships between events, ensuring that the universe unfolds sequentially rather than all at once.

Difficult to picture everything happening at once. Like being born and dying, either it’s all a moment or all there is. Does comparing all of what happens to being information stored on a chip seem reasonable?

[C C]

[...] Difficult to picture everything happening at once. Like being born and dying, either it’s all a moment or all there is. Does comparing all of what happens to being information stored on a chip seem reasonable?

The different states of development of the universe wouldn't be "happening" simultaneously, they would just collectively exist together (vaguely akin to the frames of a movie film strip). Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

Aside from our inability to visualize 4-dimensional structures (without compromise)[1], it's also unimaginable because there is no individual brain-state corresponding to experiencing your entire life as a whole. The worldline of one's brain consists of distinct differences, of which each only apprehends a particular package of information (that you interpret as a single instance of consciousness or moment of time). Each of those self-contained islands of cognition only deems itself to be real, because the others are excluded from its spacetime location and its interval of consciousness (though they are secondarily present as memory and anticipation, but that's not "real enough").

The subjective human "now" that we experience is measured in milliseconds, whereas if there was an objective now or universal rate of change outside our heads (via ignoring relativistic effects), it would have to be measured in Planck time units (to accommodate all possible subatomic events -- including the specious "movement" of a photon itself). Obviously, our massively extended duration or increment of cognition wouldn't "fit" into a Planck time unit or even a higher-level attosecond. It would stretch over countless co-existing molecular and particles differences measured as Planck time units, and thereby actually consist of a chunk-sequence of multiple brain-states carrying out processing for generating that single human experience of "now".

So each "now" that we experience doesn't really correspond to a single brain-state, but a chunk-sequence of them. The pretense of the former is purely for a simpler introductory conception (one-to-one relationship).

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Minkowski spacetime: The physical theory of special relativity was recast by Hermann Minkowski in a 4-dimensional geometry now called Minkowski space. [...] Basically, special relativity can be stated as the invariance of any spacetime interval (that is the 4D distance between any two events) when viewed from any inertial reference frame.

A 4D rendering of general relativity would be more complicated or less uniform than an ordinary block-universe, because mass warps spacetime.

Spacetime: The Unseen True Reality (Vesselin Petkov)
https://www.minkowskiinstitute.com/mip/b...ality.html

The book first analyses rigorously Hermann Minkowski's arguments that the introduced (rather discovered) by him physical concept of spacetime represents a real four-dimensional world, which turns out to be a higher true reality that is unseen in a sense that at every moment of time (at the constantly changing moment 'now') we perceive only glimpses of it, but cannot see even a small four-dimensional region of the higher reality; what we see is only three-dimensional cross-sections of it. The second part of the book consistently employs Minkowski's program of regarding physics as spacetime geometry to the analyses of gravitational and quantum phenomena, which makes it possible to obtain deeper understanding.

[confused2]

I'm not convinced (by the AI) that the speed of light is what 'causes' time. Unfortunately I don't think we (or anyone) know(s) what causes the speed of light to be what it is. My guess is that Pi probably comes into why both is what what they are and they'd be the same in any universe - so I'd blame pi for both rather than saying either one causes the other. Could be completely wrong.

[Syne]

The speed of light limit only means that there's no universally synced-up "now." It has nothing to do with whether time, itself, exists or not.
Space and the possibility for motion are what allows for time. As long as motion through space occurs at any finite speed, it must take time to do so. This is why space and time are fundamentally linked.

[confused2]

Time allows two things to be in the same place (at different times) without being on top of each other - space is another (separate) thing.