What is Time? When Did Time Begin?

When Did Time Begin?

No one knows exactly when time began. Humans weren’t handed a cosmic manual on how to manage it — unfortunately! Because if I had one, I’d travel back in time and bet on Manchester United’s winning streaks. (I know, right?)

Before the invention of clocks and telescopes, people tracked time using natural cycles — the changing of seasons, birth and death, and the motions of the Sun and our Moon. Over the centuries, as Christianity became dominant in Europe, scholars sought to connect biblical events to the world’s history.

Irish Science Fact – Did You Know?

• In 1620, Irish Archbishop James Ussher proposed the precise date of the Creation of the world to be 4004 BC by counting backward from the time of Jesus all the way to Adam himself using biblical genealogies and historical records.

As time continued to travel forward, so too, did the belief that the world began in 4004 BC, as scientists had no basis on which to make a different proposal.

But what about the fossilized species found in rocks? How did the remains of diverse species get fossilized in the first place, and, can someone explain how these fossils are found high above the sea levels, like the mountains? Clearly there was a need for a longer timeline, and we are talking a much longer timeline.

Centuries went by, and with them more theories on the age of the universe. Until one moment, in 1770s, a French mathematician and cosmologist Comte de Buffon proposed that the origin of our planet formed from a ball of molten material and estimated that it would take around 36,000 to 75,000 years to cool down into a solid state it is today. Theologians back then did not like this proposed number.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries too, had some of the finest scientists calculating and brainstorming about how we could find out the exact date of the Universe, and thus, time itself. Some famous names like pop up in those centuries, such as Edwin Hubble and his proposal of the age of the universe to be around 2 billion years.

Fast forward to our century and what we know about the age of time is through an event called the Big Bang. One possibility is that time started at the Big Bang event and simply did not exist before. Scientists have roughly narrowed down the Big Bang event to have occurred around 13.8 billion years ago thanks to powerful telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which tracks the expansion of the universe using redshift — the stretching of light toward the red end of the spectrum.