Photographs, Motion and Time

I brought up the subject of time and motion with my ten year old son the other day. When I asked him if time would stop if all motion everywhere stopped, he replied that such a situation would be like a photograph.

Like a photograph

There’s no time in a photograph. A photograph may fade and crumble, but the image as such is static. The only reason it changes is that things keep on moving in the world we live in. Chemical processes continue. Photons zip across space. Everything is in motion. But should all of this stop, we too would become like a photograph. There would be no changes of any kind.

However, if so much as one thing started moving, the enchantment would be broken. Once there’s motion, time starts up again.

The God clock

Some may object to this and say that time continues even when all things have stopped. However, this would require a of God clock that keeps on ticking when all things in the universe have stopped. Time would have to be something that exists outside of the universe, and to introduce such a concept is to introduce mysticism.

To illustrate, let us for a moment consider time to be a God thing. Would we be able to detect a situation where everything stopped in the universe, but the God clock continued tick?

The answer is no.

Even if the universe stopped for eons according to the God clock. Things would simply revert to normal once we let things start moving again. No-one in the universe would be able to detect the glitch. It might as well not have happened. So, the existence or non-existence of a God clock is irrelevant to our perception of the universe.

Conclusion

The only way we ever detect time is through motion. Hence, time is relative motion. There’s no other way to detect it. We measure it relative to something else. We look for things that move at a steady pace, and we use these as clocks.

Should all things stop so that there’s no motion and no change of any kind, time ceases to exist, and it will only reappear once motion starts up again.