How did time come about?

Sometimes it flies past, sometimes it crawls by. You can have too much of it, too little, enough or none at all. You can lose track of it, but you can also keep an eye on it. But how did time actually come about?

Days, months, years

The answer depends on what exactly you mean by ‘time’. For example, we think of time in terms of days, months and years. These are periods of time that relate to the earth, the moon and the sun.

A day is the time the earth takes to rotate once around its own axis. A month is the time it takes the moon to orbit the earth. And a year is the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun.

Chopped up

These periods of time came about when the earth, sun and moon were created. That happened roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Much later, when humans began living on earth, they started keeping track of these time periods in calendars. Later on, they also started chopping time up into smaller units. For example, they began to measure time in hours, minutes and seconds.

So years, months and days were created at the same time as the earth. But hours, minutes and seconds were invented by humans much later.

Since the Big Bang

But these are all just ways of quantifying time. How time itself came about, no one knows. Like space, time has existed since the Big Bang.

Time will always exist. Because we need time for things to happen. Without time, everything in the universe would always remain the same. And that would be very boring; like a film on pause forever.

Answered by Yannick Fritschy