You’re sitting there, maybe checking your watch or glancing at the corner of your phone screen, and you see the numbers click over. It feels like a constant stream. A river. But honestly, if you ask a physicist how was time created, you aren’t going to get a simple "it started at noon on a Tuesday" kind of answer. It’s way messier than that.
Time is weird.
Most of us think of it as this universal background track that plays while the universe does its thing. We imagine a giant clock in the sky. But Einstein basically ruined that cozy idea back in 1905. He showed us that time isn't some fixed stage; it’s actually a dimension, woven tightly into the fabric of space itself. They call it spacetime.
The Big Bang and the "North Pole" Problem
If we want to get technical about how was time created, we have to go back about 13.8 billion years. This is the Big Bang. Now, don't picture an explosion in a dark room. There was no "room." There was no "before."
Stephen Hawking had this famous way of explaining it. He said asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole. It’s not that there’s a secret wall there; it’s just that the concept of "north" loses all meaning at that point. Same goes for time. If time is a property of the universe, and the universe started at the Big Bang, then "before" simply doesn't exist.
Everything we know—every second, every heartbeat—was packed into a singularity. A point of infinite density. When that singularity began to expand, space expanded, and time started ticking along with it.
Is Time Actually an Illusion?
There is a group of scientists, including people like Julian Barbour, who argue that time might not even be "real" in the way we experience it. They suggest the universe is just a collection of "Nows."
Think of a movie film strip.
Each frame is a static image. The characters aren't moving. Nothing is "happening" in the individual frame. But when you run that strip through a projector, you get the illusion of flow. You see a story. Some physicists believe the universe is just a massive pile of these frames, and our brains are the projector. We create the "flow" because our memories link one frame to the next.
Entropy: Why Time Only Goes One Way
Why can't you un-spill a glass of milk?
This is the Arrow of Time. It’s dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law says that entropy—which is basically a fancy word for disorder—always increases in a closed system. The early universe was incredibly ordered. It was "low entropy." Ever since then, things have been getting messier.
We remember the past and not the future because of this move from order to chaos. If the universe started in a state of high entropy, we might not experience time at all. It’s the gradient that matters. It’s the slide down the hill.
Gravity Can Literally Stretch Your Afternoon
If you want proof that time is a physical thing that was "created" with specific properties, look at General Relativity. Gravity warps time. This isn't science fiction; it’s why your GPS works.
Satellites orbiting Earth are further away from the planet's mass, so gravity is slightly weaker up there. Because gravity is weaker, time actually moves faster for those satellites—by about 38 microseconds a day. If engineers didn't account for that tiny skip in time, the GPS on your phone would be miles off within 24 hours.
You’re literally living in a different time flow than a pilot flying at 30,000 feet. It’s microscopic, but it’s there. Time is flexible. It’s stretchy.
The Quantum Mess
Things get really dicey when you try to mix time with quantum mechanics. In the world of the very small, time doesn't always seem to behave. Some equations in quantum gravity, like the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, actually leave time out entirely.
The equation describes the state of the whole universe, but $t$ (time) is nowhere to be found. This led many to wonder if time is an "emergent property."
Think of it like temperature. An individual atom doesn't have a "temperature." Temperature is just what happens when you have a billion atoms bumping into each other. Time might be the same—a macroscopic effect that doesn't exist at the most fundamental level of reality.
Atomic Clocks and the Definition of a Second
We used to define time by the Earth's rotation. One day. Simple. But the Earth is a bit of a lazy timekeeper; it slows down because of tidal friction from the moon.
Today, we define a second by the vibrations of a Cesium-133 atom. Specifically, a second is 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of that atom. It’s terrifyingly precise. But even this precision is just us measuring the "tick" of a universe that started its clock 13.8 billion years ago.
Real-World Implications of Time’s Origin
Understanding how was time created isn't just for people in lab coats. It changes how we view our place in the cosmos.
- The Finiteness of Life: If time had a beginning, it likely has an end. Whether it’s the "Big Freeze" or the "Big Crunch," the clock won't run forever.
- Space Travel: As we look toward Mars or beyond, we have to deal with the fact that time is relative. High-speed travel means astronauts will age slower than people on Earth.
- Technology: From high-frequency trading in finance to the synchronization of global internet servers, our entire civilization relies on the fact that we can slice the "creation" of time into nanoseconds.
What You Can Do With This Information
It’s easy to feel small when thinking about singularities and entropy. But you can actually use the "stretchy" nature of time to your advantage, at least psychologically.
- Practice Time Perception: Research shows that when you experience new things, your brain records more data, making the time feel "longer" in retrospect. This is why childhood summers felt like they lasted decades, but your last year at a desk job flew by in a week. To "expand" your time, break your routine.
- Check Your Tech: Recognize that your devices are constantly correcting for relativistic time shifts. It’s a reminder that the deep physics of the Big Bang is actually helping you find the nearest Starbucks.
- Acknowledge the "Now": Since many physicists argue that the past and future are just different configurations of the present, focusing on the current "frame" is actually more scientifically accurate than worrying about frames that haven't been "projected" yet.
Time started with a bang, it flows because of a mess, and it slows down when things get heavy. It's the most familiar thing we have, and yet, we're only just beginning to understand what it actually is.
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Instead of seeing time as a disappearing resource, view it as a dimension you are currently navigating. You aren't just moving through time; you are part of the very fabric that was knit together at the start of everything.
Next Steps for the Curious
To dive deeper into the mechanics of the early universe, look into the Planck Epoch. This is the first $10^{-43}$ seconds of the universe where our current laws of physics—and our definition of time—completely break down. You can also research Time Crystals, a relatively new phase of matter discovered by researchers like Christopher Monroe, where atoms repeat in time just as they repeat in space in a normal crystal. These discoveries are currently pushing the boundaries of how we define "ticking" at a quantum level.