Writing a Philosophy Essay on "Time is not real" (HELP), Time, Is time real? Options

[why-think]

I am very interested on the topic but know very little in comparison to the people I've seen posting. I was hoping for some help on the topic, including some good sources as well as some of your opinions and/or input.

Any help is greatly appreciated!! (Topic "Time is not real")

Thanks a lot,
foursquare

[Rick]

Time as we experience in life via consciousness is real. However, time, as conceptualized by people in general and in physics is not real, but an abstraction. Treating time as real leads to fallacies.

For example, the first fallacy one runs into by treating time as real is time travel paradoxes. Around the turn of the 19th century, H.G. Wells popularized the notion of time as the fourth dimension with his science fiction novel The Time Machine. Time travel results in all sorts of nonsensical paradoxes such as the ability to kill one's grandfather.

So then one is led to say that perhaps time is real, but one can't go backward in it, only forward. That leads to another problem. If time is a real dimension, then the past and the future have some kind of existence. That is, the future is a real "place" in space-time that if we just wait a bit we will be there. However, a 4-d spacetime with a real time dimension implies that the future is pre-ordained, fixed for all time, and unchangeable. That is clearly not the case (see the free will discussions).

A counter-argument (that time is indeed real) is the fact that time is essential in physical laws, forumlas, and computations. Physics equations are full of the variable "t" for time. However, the variable t can be replaced with an equivalent energy term so that "t" disappears from physics. Instead of velocity (meters per second) we have momentum or energy, for example. This makes the equations more complex, and unwieldy, so no physicist does it. Thus it can be seen that time is merely a computational convenience for physics as well as ordinary thinking and planning, not something that has an actual existence. The illusion of the reality of time comes form our very real sensation of the passage of time, which is an aspect of human experience (consciousness).