Time has several descriptions such as psychological time, calendar time and physical time. From a scientific perspective Julian Barbour has described time as a result of timeless information. I believe he is onto something.

From a practical perspective physical time is the change happening in the present moment. And I think that's what time is. Time is simply the change happening moment to moment.

When did time begin? The answer is: time began now. There is only the present moment. With the idea of time as timeless information, then how can there be movement when the information is timeless, meaning static and fixed? It can be explained by having an infinite amount of information. Consider the Mandelbrot set:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD2XgQOyCCk[/youtube]

The zooming into the Mandelbrot set can go on forever. And yet the Mandelbrot set is just the result of information from a simple timeless equation: f(z) = z² + c.

What would happen if we zoomed into the Mandelbrot set infinitely fast? The zooming-in will still go on forever! And similarly our universe can be seen as a result of timeless information unfolding infinitely fast. The total amount of information is increasing all the time yet the information that is unfolding is timeless and infinite.

This means that our entire past is contained within the present moment. Think of it as compressing the entire history of the universe into the now moment. That's billions of years of history represented as timeless information in the now. So the past is real and is preserved but it's still only timeless information.

The future is generated by the continuous unfolding of the infinite amount of timeless information. One second of time is the result of timeless information being unfolded infinitely fast. And the continuous growth of information that has been unfolded gives rise to the arrow of time and the evolution of our universe leading to more and more complexity. And as Stephen Wolfram has explained, even simple processes are often what he calls computationally irreducible which means that it's impossible, even in theory, to fully predict future results.

So the entire past is squeezed into the timeless and eternal now moment, and the future is generated moment by moment since there is no end to the infinite amount of information that is unfolding infinitely fast. And still, for example yesterday really is 24 hours into the past, and it's just that the past, at the deepest physical level, is timeless information.

Anders, you are a smart fellow.
I think some of the black hole physicists would enjoy this thread, as some of them believe that this timeless information is the only consistent escapee from said holes.

I've wondered before about Egyptian references to the hole at center of milky way, the helpful dung beetle rolling the past into the present as he clutches at the impossibly hot accretion disc below the circle ..

Certainly their culture knew a lot more than ours, as evidenced by their art..

Hypothesis: Our universe is finite. This solves Zeno's paradoxes, such as:

"Suppose Homer wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In the quoted example, Homer is able to start walking because in our actual physical universe there is a limit to how small steps can be made, such as the Planck length which is a tiny, tiny distance much smaller than an atom yet it's a fixed length greater than zero. It's like pixels on a computer screen. For infinite screen resolution the pixels would have to have zero size, which is impossible in physical reality. Similarly space is quantized like pixels or more like voxels which is the 3D version of pixels. And perhaps as Nassim Haramein has suggested, the voxels overlap in a flower of life pattern.

But as Haramein has said, there may be even smaller scales below the Planck length but that's something leading to tiny black holes probably and are new universes which themselves also are finite.

And even with the total amount of information increasing all the time in the universe, the sum remains finite. And that explains how time can go on forever. We will never reach infinity!

Time is a result of the universe unfolding infinitely fast. And since the universe is always finite there is no end to that process of creation. Time started now and reached present day infinitely fast and still the next second will actually take one second of time to unfold. So the entire past including the entire history of the universe since the Big Bang billions of years ago is created infinitely fast in zero seconds time in the now, and still the past is real and yesterday is precisely 24 hours back into the past. Maybe I already mentioned it in my first post but think of all the past as compressed with infinite compression into the single now moment.

I believe the actual expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down. And the apparent acceleration of space is because of vacuum friction. So the extra redshift measured in the recent decades by astronomers is not because of some accelerated expansion but because photons lose energy over vast distances due to vacuum friction and less energy means lower frequency of the light which is the same effect as redshift.

So how can the information in the universe continue to expand enough to preserve the past if the expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down? The answer is that even though there is a cutoff at Planck length there is still enormous activity going on below that scale and so new information is generated on that level.

So how can the information in the universe continue to expand enough to preserve the past if the expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down?

Does this theory really "preserve the past", other than the apparent truth that the present is what it is because culmination of all information up to that point?

Phil wrote:

So how can the information in the universe continue to expand enough to preserve the past if the expansion of the size of the universe is slowing down?

Does this theory really "preserve the past", other than the apparent truth that the present is what it is because culmination of all information up to that point?

The idea is that instead of the information in the universe changing there is an ever increase of new information. So all the past is preserved in the now moment, because the old information never changes and the process of creation is that new information emerges all the time adding to the already existing "pile" of information. And Leonard Susskind, a mainstream physicist said that the deepest law of physics he knows of is that bits of information are indestructible (from about 11 minutes):

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY&t=10m33s[/youtube]