What time is it?

With Stephen Hawking changing some of his views on what happens when a black hole swallows us, I guess I want to think out loud about some of my more recent crazier notions. First of all, as prologue, I'm not sure that what Hawking means is that a human body would come out of a black hole, even in unrecognizable form. What I gather he is saying is that the energy that makes up the mass of our bodies that would return but in a form not as we were, more like Slim (credit to Wally McRae's "Reincarnation"). It would not be matter, but energy, like the hologram form most of us can be thought of if you look deeply into matter. But it is physicists' uses of time that I like to look at. It started with reading in Scientific American some months ago an essay on time that discussed, among other things, the question of why we can only go forward in time. I think that to explain that we have to look at what time is. Despite the fact that it can be used in mathematics as a special dimension of the universe, I suggest time is actually our definition of the process of change. One reason why physicists often say that time began with the Big Bang (under current theories which I understand may be in the process of being modified) is that time cannot occur unless there is change. In an unchanging universe there can be no time. The dial of a clock would not turn, the electrons in an atom would not go around the nucleus. Nothing would ever change. Humans who existed (which would not be possible in such a universe) would be like statues without wind, rain or pigeons. If time is a fourth dimension outside the process of change, we could potentially return to some point in the past; but if time, as I suggest, is only a way to look at change, like a yardstick is a way to look at distance, then it is too integral to the process of change to reverse. Thus, the only way to go is forward.

Secondly, I think that we also have to realize when dealing with time that none of us can be aware of existing in the present. We existed in the past but we exist not in the present but the future. Even as we think that this is the present, the heart beats again and the blood flows to a new point and where we were is the past and we are in that point's future. Some people have suggested that time exists in packets, like photons of light, and if that is true then I suppose time would have a tick-tock present. But I believe that time is seamless, as a measurement of change which is ongoing, and that we then cannot ever be in what we define as the present. Now, I'm not sure if this is really crazy thinking or if there is some significance here. But I think the concept that time is a measurement can be used to explain why people at different speeds, such as one at the speed of light in space and one on earth, will record a difference in time. If you go faster, change occurs at a more rapid rate. You go faster into the future so it arrives sooner than it does for someone going significantly slower. I would suggest in addition, that the future consists of light. In other words, one cannot be aware of change except in the presence of the energy of light. One additional thought about time being a measurement of change is that one day by the clock does not always fit into the actual rotation of the earth. Airplanes and space ships and radio and television stations sometimes have to adjust to compensate for a few seconds longer in a day to prevent being off course or offering dead air. (This surprised me when I read it in an article, I think in Time.) And I wish I had the math to work this out.