What even is time? It’s what many wish they had more of the night before an exam. It’s what we use to document and lay out events from past to present to future.
When U of T physicist Hazem Daoud spoke to The Varsity, he described time as an arrow pointing towards higher entropy. Entropy is the phenomenon in which the world is always moving towards — a state of higher disorder, or chaos. If ice cream is left out, it will melt over time instead of solidifying. Similarly, a clean room will get dirty over time without one’s active effort to keep it clean. The arrow of time is irreversible in the current state of the world, as entropy is always increasing, never decreasing.
Yet, all that to say, nobody actually knows what time is. It has certain properties but not a clear definition. A particularly interesting and useful property of time is that it is not the same for everyone and everything.
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