Since the beginning of time, people have accomplished amazing achievements. We have created the iPhone, modern day medicine and even nutella. Every major accomplishment that has been done has then been given a date and time at which it happened in history. But how do we know time even exists? We don’t.

In 2007, Scientist Ferenc Krausz probed the shortest time intervals clocked at 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. He used and ultraviolet laser to create pulses to track short durations in leaps of electrons between atoms. Even with the work Krausz has done, there is an even smaller realm of time where even attoseconds can seem like an era called the Planck scale. This scale defines a region where distance and time are so short that the very idea of time and space start to break down and signifies the end of investigated physics. So time does not exist at the most basic understanding of physical reality.

The idea that time doesn’t not exist is known as the ‘problem of time’. This is the idea that the laws of physics does not explain why time only goes forward. No matter what, time will tick towards the future and with no way to reverse it.

Time is thought to be defined as what our clocks measure. But time really does not exist, clocks exist. Time is just an agreed upon theory on how to measure the rotation of the Earth around the sun. Even though time is useful, we have fallen victim to living our lives revolved around time. We have confused a shared construct with something that is real.