What is time? - Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Time makes us all a prisoner of the present, forever transitioning from our own past into an unknown future."

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the mind bending concept of time.

Neil is interviewed by UNSW Science presenter Don Kountouris.

[princeLC]

I love that Beyoncé used his sound bite on her song “Lift off” on the Renaissance tour! So awesome!!!

[stargod]

Man created time, And because of this, We suffer a paralyzing fear that no other animal endures. The fear of time running out.

[thechanelallure]

For those that don’t know, this interview is used in Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, right before she performs “Lift Off”

[yaksofirst]

after watching this video i am 2 minutes and 28 seconds older

[maha_]

He actually does explain time or at least builds a picture for us so that we can comprehend the concept of time. At 0:30 he explains how he thinks we are prisioners of time. Time is a unit of measurement of space/quantity/property. This makes time a dimension. It is the unit of the measure of a type of space/quantity/property we cannot yet comprehend like we can comprehend length and height and width. This is because we can actually move in 3 dimensions (length, width and height). Forward backwards and so on. But just like he said we are stuck in time, we cannot move in time. We cannot move sideways or forward or backwards in time. But we know it's there.

[BennyDYT]

Even more mindblowing question is - " Is time actually part of our universe we live in, or is it simply just what we as humans came up with to be able to better explain the past, present and future? Because without time, there are no events to be experienced in our logic as we first usually ask ourselves * When did it happen, is happening or will happen * " wrap your head around that...

Things happen whether time IS or IS NOT, i mean do animals know about time? Most probably not and do they need to? They do not, so it definitely is bizzare thing to talk about, but to be fair, anything around universe, how it works and life itself is always the one and only mystery nobody will ever have a straight answer to.

[empereurjustinien]

We can only understand life backwards but we must live it forward.

[Eatchins]

Spot on, time is a measurement of motion and movement. Our perception on time is riddled with our experience of being alive and what

[Whatisright]

Time's just a measure for change then. It's how we identify change. Reason you can't go back in time is you can't undo change. If it's just a measure there's nothing to go backwards or forwards to. There's just this constant we call the present.

[sweiland]

The background music gives me a creepy feeling.

[sunilWayanad]

Say "We don't know yet" !

[alexdrudigmail]

In my opinion, this is not helping anyone to get a better understanding of time in the slightest.

[Fascistbeast]

Time is always moving forward just like the Universe is expanding this moment

All objects are subject to time because of aging and entropy

Obviously time is your number one asset

[wfhyubp]

Time is the concept by which we visualize the state of ourselves and everything else in the universe transitioning between being and not being. We measure time by the span of our own passing. We call one rotation of the earth a day, (Give or take), then chop that rotation into ever smaller pieces or add those pieces into bigger chunks to make it easier to visualize. So, considering the speed of rotation of an atom, does that atom experience time as we do, or does it dance to its own tune of rotation ?. The smaller thing are, the faster they transition between being and not being. Compare the life span of a fly to that of an elephant, but do they both experience the passing of their existance at the same rate ?.

[RussNo]

I'm not convinced time is actually a thing. It's simply the way we perceive progress.

[colwyncallingbull]

What is time truly? It's a concept we have come up with and measured it so that we can keep track of things and make sense of the reality we live in. The time we all live; seconds, hours, and years, it's all relative to the rotational behaviour of Earth around the sun. Days or years wouldn't mean anything if there are beings out there, thats if they are intelligent at all. To them, maybe they have their own units of measurements or have a better understanding of time. Time is indeed a word we made up but is it really made up by us with our ever so complex brains that we have to understand things? How can we define something if we haven't fully discovered or explain it in its entirety? Why is it so baffling? Why is it so limiting? Why can we not travel backwards in time? Why is time the death of everything? So many questions that it has..

[thearchitect]

I'm pretty sure pre-Christian and non-Christian societies had a deep understanding of time, the geometry of the Earth and the the heliocentric concept. It's Christian fundamentalists of the European dark ages who brought humanity backwards, because everyone else who had not yet been enslaved or victimized by Christians were progressing forward and developing their science and technology. It's Christians who have set back human progress by at least 500 years or even more!

[loveleyday]

Basically, Tyson doesn't know.
But he comes close at 0:55 when he talks about coordinates, and admits that time does not share the same properties as all the other coordinates, WHICH... means time is NOT a coordinate! But he didn't get that far.

Time is simply the comparison of two movements.

It could be the movement of a shadow across a sundial, a pendulum across a clock body, a quartz crystal against the pendulum, a cesium vibration against the quartz crystal, etc. Time is a ratio of two movements.

[dennisgalvin]

Tyson states that It took disturbingly long to figure out that the moving sun is an illusion created by Earth's Rotations it's taking disturbingly longer to figure out that passage of Time is the same thing created by the same thing.

[timeisapathwalkingtounderstand]

God is time. He created it so everything doesn't happen at once. And without him we lose it. So don't waste your time doing nothing. Don't forget to tell God thank you for time. Do it before it's too late.