When Was the Beginning of Time?

I mean, it's often described as an EXTREMELY ancient period so when do you think it was?

Well time begins 1 and ends at 12..

Time began on Sunday, November 18th, 1883. (Standard Time, that is.)

edited 2nd May '17 4:16:31 PM by pwiegle

Well time doesn't exist for me because I can change my perception of time at will.

15,000,000,000 B.C.

@superboy313: I'm afraid you're going to get a lot more flippant answers than serious ones, because it's the sort of question that can't really be answered.

Kind of like: "When does a sentient organism become self-aware?" or "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a noise?" or "Does the light really go out when you close the refrigerator door?"

(Sorry, couldn't resist that last one...)

Serious answer. Time literally began with the Big Bang. Time is a dimension of the universe. Without a universe, there is no dimension, no time.

Time Magazine began circulation with its first issue publication on March 3 1923.

When you were born.

It hasn't actually happened yet. All we know is a dream, one we all share, before it's time to wake up. And when time, true TIME, begins...well, how the hell should I know what happens? Could be that we find that we're all organic batteries for machines, or that the skies are green and the Sun is deep in the sea, or that everything temporally stops when the universe dies of stretching itself too much. Or we just roll over and smash the snooze button so hard that the alarm clock breaks and we all just continue to sleep forever.

Or not. Nothing can mean everything, and nobody knows anything for sure. Or not. Come to your own conclusions, listen to every other conclusion you can find, and keep your mind open. Not too open though, there's plenty of stuff out there that doesn't belong in there, but tries to get in anyway.

In the most infinitesimally small era after the Big Bang known as the Grand Unification Epoch, when gravity as a force became separate from the other main forces, and what we know as time could conceivably started from.

I suppose time started with the first day, if you believe the Biblical account of creation. Other than that I guess it just started when the universe started, or maybe when humans decided to start measuring it maybe.

March 3, 1923.

Or, alternatively, when someone in the previous universe figured out precisely what it was and what it was for.

It's hard to say. After all, it's a ball of timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly... stuff.

According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, time is not absolute, but depends upon the observer's movement through time. So time only exists when there is somebody present with the mental capacity to understand the concept of time.

Ergo, if there is no observer, then there is no time. So time didn't exist before sapient organisms evolved who could distinguish between past, present, and future...

edited 3rd May '17 3:20:27 PM by pwiegle

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant set out to show the contradictions on both sides of the universe having a finite or infinite age. If it was finite, then it had to come into being at some point in time, which would imply some causality outside the universe. If infinite, there would be an infinite amount of time before any event, which he considered absurd.

A few Christian theologians had already an answer for that first one: time itself might have started "when" the universe did. Now some physicists suggest that time may be a reflection of a deeper process, like how light and matter are the cumulative effect of quantum objects that are neither particles nor waves. We can only speculate what this deeper reality may be, but it raises the intriguing and not at all worrying possibility that space-time in the future may deteriorate, or just not continue working the way we know.

Last Thursday.

Time was a concept founded when our plane of existence began.

Next Thursday.

^ But today is Thursday. You mean I have to wait 7 days worth of time for time to begin?

edited 4th May '17 5:41:41 AM by MajorTom

Yep. What we're currently experiencing is just the stuff described in our reality's Opening Scroll. Or something.

I think it was a Tuesday.

...and when will it stop? Time is important, and I am a clock!

edited 4th May '17 10:59:54 AM by DrNoPuma

When we finally realise the egg came before the chicken. dinosaurs laid eggs

Alternatively: When the player has finished creating a new game.

That doesn't change the relative positions of the chicken and egg.

edited 4th May '17 11:44:34 AM by StarAndroidJaguar

if the theory of evolution is to be believed, the chicken and the egg were both beaten by the single-celled organism.