6 mind-blowing facts about time 

february 18, 2025

Images: Shutterstock

Time is the continued progress of events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.

Source: Oxford Dictionary

While time is an intrinsic part of everyday life, it is one of the most profound mysteries of physics. Here are some mind-boggling facts about it!

Time will cease to be linear (no future or past) when the universe reaches "heat death", where galaxies drift too far apart for any meaningful interactions.

Death of linear time

Time superposition, like Schrödinger’s cat, suggests multiple realities existing—like a cat being both alive and dead—at once. Only observation collapses them into one reality.

Schrodinger's cat

Time is funky in the quantum world, where two protons get “entangled” and communicate billions of light-years apart in an attosecond which is one quintillionth of a second!

Attosecond!

English speakers view time as distance, moving from left to right; Mandarin speakers see it vertically and Greek speakers perceive it in terms of volume.

Language and time

If an object is traveling close to the speed of light, time will be significantly slower for that object compared to an observer at rest.

Time dilation

At CERN's Hadron Collider, particles travel at 99.99% the speed of light in a 27 km ring, causing one second for a proton to equal hours for an outside observer.

Protons at the speed of light

5 incredible space discoveries of the 21st century

Thanks for reading!

See next

Read Now