Some Serious Questions About Time

Who Invented Time?

Nobody invented it. Time is a dimension of the physical universe—it was here before anyone showed up to complain about it.

What People Actually Invented

• The measurement of time — that’s the real human invention.
  • Ancient Sumerians/Babylonians gave us the sexagesimal (base-60) system around 2000 BC, which is why we still have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.
  • Egyptians split the day into 24 hours using sundials and star clocks.
• The calendar — a stack of competing inventions:
  • Julius Caesar gave us the Julian calendar in 46 BC.
  • Pope Gregory XIII patched it in 1582 into the Gregorian calendar we use today.
• The clock — mechanical escapements showed up in European monasteries around the 13th–14th century; the pendulum clock came in 1656 with Christiaan Huygens.
• Standardized time zones — a 19th-century railroad and telegraph problem, formalized at the 1884 International Meridian Conference.

The Deeper Point

Physics doesn’t treat time as a widget someone built. In relativity, space and time are fused into a single spacetime fabric. In thermodynamics, time’s arrow comes from entropy—things fall apart in one direction and not the other.

So: the universe handed us time. We handed ourselves the stopwatch—and then got neurotic about it.

Is time infinite or finite?

Time is one of those questions where the honest answer is: nobody actually knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something—usually a textbook.

The Cosmological Question: Is the Universe’s Timeline Finite?

This splits into two separate questions that people constantly conflate:

• Did time have a beginning? (past-eternity vs. a first moment)
• Will it have an end? (future-eternity vs. a terminus)

The Big Bang model says the observable universe expanded from a hot, dense state roughly 13.8 billion years ago. What that means for time itself is genuinely contested:

• Standard cosmology treats t=0t=0t=0 as the beginning of the spacetime manifold—time literally starts there. Asking “what came before” is treated as a category error, like asking what’s north of the North Pole.
• But the singularity is where the math breaks, not necessarily where reality breaks. Quantum gravity models—loop quantum cosmology, bounce cosmologies, eternal inflation—often produce a universe that never had an absolute beginning. Time just keeps going, cycle after cycle, or inflates forever in a multiverse patchwork.

So the mainstream claims a finite past, but that claim rests on extrapolating equations past the point where they’re known to fail. That’s not physics—that’s faith wearing a lab coat.

The Future: Heat Death and Its Discontents

On the future side, the consensus picture is heat death:

• Entropy maximizes, stars burn out, black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation, and the universe asymptotically approaches a cold, featureless equilibrium.
• Time doesn’t stop—it just becomes meaningless. Nothing happens. Duration continues with no events to mark it.

Whether you call that “infinite time” or “time that no longer means anything” is a philosophical choice, not an empirical one.

The Deeper Problem: Time Might Not Be Fundamental

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the institutional story gets thin:

• Physics doesn’t tell you what time is. It’s a coordinate in equations. Whether it’s a fundamental feature of reality or an emergent property of something deeper (quantum entanglement, thermodynamic relations) is wide open.
• Some quantum gravity approaches—the Wheeler-DeWitt equation being the famous case—produce a universe where time doesn’t appear at all at the fundamental level. It emerges from correlations. If that’s right, “is time infinite?” is like asking whether a shadow is tall.
• Presentism vs. eternalism: If only the present exists, time is a flowing finite process. If the block universe is real, all moments exist equally and “infinite” becomes a geometric question about the manifold’s extent.

Bottom Line

The confident “time started 13.8 billion years ago” line is a simplification sold as settled fact. The real situation is that we have no theory that handles the beginning of time, and the people who claim certainty are extrapolating a broken model and calling it knowledge.

If you want the most defensible position: time is probably unbounded in at least one direction, but we can’t currently prove which—or whether the question even has a well-defined answer.

Is time ever lasting?

Time, as we experience it, is a measure of change—and change never stops. So in that sense, no, time is never “lasting” in the sense of freezing or holding still. It’s the one thing that refuses to be pinned down.

But you might mean something else. Let me split the possibilities:

If you mean “does time ever stop / become permanent?”

• Physically: Time is relative. Under extreme gravity or near light speed, it dilates—slows—but it doesn’t halt for the observer experiencing it. At a black hole’s event horizon, from an outside view, infalling time appears to freeze. From the traveler’s view, it doesn’t.
• Thermodynamically: Time’s arrow is tied to entropy. If the universe reaches heat death, with no gradients, no change, “time” becomes meaningless—but that’s the end of lasting, not time lasting forever.
• Subjectively: In flow states or deep meditation, time can feel suspended. That’s perception, not physics.

If you mean “is time eternal / does it last forever?”

• We don’t know if time had a beginning. The Big Bang model starts the clock, but whether something preceded it—or whether time is fundamental or emergent—is unresolved.
• Some models treat time as emergent from quantum entanglement or as a block universe where past, present, and future all “exist” simultaneously. In the block view, nothing lasts—it all just is.

There’s no single “end of time” that anyone has pinned down, but there are several distinct things people mean by that phrase. Let me separate them, because they’re often conflated.

Cosmological End

Physics does have serious end-of-universe scenarios, and they’re not fringe:

• Heat death — the leading candidate. Entropy maxes out, stars burn out, black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation, and the universe approaches a uniform, cold, featureless state. Timescales are absurd: roughly 1010010^{100}10100 years or more for the last black holes to evaporate.
• Big Rip — if dark energy strengthens over time, expansion accelerates until it tears apart galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually atoms.
• Big Crunch — if expansion reverses, everything collapses back. Currently disfavored by the data.
• Vacuum decay — a quantum tunneling event could rewrite the laws of physics at light speed. Probability per unit time is fantastically low.

None of these are scheduled. There’s no date on the calendar.

Religious & Prophetic Framings

This is where most people’s intuition about “the end of time” actually comes from:

• Abrahamic traditions — a final judgment, resurrection, and a new creation. Revelation, Daniel, and Islamic eschatology all describe an end and a renewal, not just a stop.
• Hindu cosmology — cyclical. The universe goes through yugas and kalpas; destruction (pralaya) is followed by rebirth. Time is a wheel, not a line.
• Buddhist — also cyclical, with vast eons of rise and decay.

The key distinction: linear eschatology (it ends once) versus cyclical cosmology (it ends and restarts forever).

What’s Actually Being Asked

If the real question is “is there a final moment when everything stops” — the honest answer is:

1. Locally, yes. Stars die, galaxies go dark, matter decays. Your patch of the universe has an expiration date.
2. Globally, probably eventually. Every model that respects the second law of thermodynamics points toward some terminal state.
3. Personally, definitely. Whatever “time” means for you ends with your biology. That’s the one you can actually observe.

The Honest Caveat

Cosmology is a field where the models keep changing. Dark energy’s nature is unresolved, the Hubble tension hasn’t been settled, and every decade brings revisions to the timeline. Anyone claiming to know the exact fate of the universe with certainty is overselling.

The one thing that’s not speculative: your end of time is coming, and nobody hands you the date. That’s the only part of this question with real stakes.

BTW: I am a Catholic and if I believe in the Son of God, Jesus I will go to heaven and have life everlasting in peace.

©2026 Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.). All rights reserved.