Time is a curious thing that can be exact, imprecise, slow for some and faster for others. Time exists in the mind and in the universe. And according to some theories, one day time may even come to a halt. So let’s find out how, why, and when in this article which seeks to answer the question

“will time end? “

Time requires consciousness on what happens when you die. I believe that consciousness is fundamental to the concept of time and that without conscious beings, time simply stops existing.

I guess it’s similar to an old thought experiment which asks if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it. Does it make a sound if nobody’s there to perceive it? Does an event happen? Is perception the fundamental driver of all things even the things we cannot control? This idea requires us to evaluate the exact wording of our question, like when we mean an end, do we mean a permanent end or a temporary one-cricket-match end? But that doesn’t mean all cricket is a finished-forever-relationship end, or that you can never date again unless it’s a really messy breakup and you buried your lover in a shallow grave outside a kindergarten.

Furthermore, just because one event ends, it does not necessarily mean every other event ends as well. What if when the time finally ends, whether it’s limited to a human’s perception or the actual death of the universe? What if it simply does so to allow new time to begin or perhaps no more time will come, and something new and bizarre will take its place.

Eternally inflating universes current estimates pegged the age of our universe at around fourteen billion years old, but according to some physicists, we may not make it out of our teens as they believed time could grind to a halt five billion years or three billion years from now or in one second dang. I hope I’m wearing clean underwear.

Theoretically, time could have ended at any point during this article or at any point in history. For that matter and how physicists worked this out, well, it has something to do with the origins of our universe and the concept of infinity.

This prediction is based on the idea of eternal inflation which describes our universe as one of an infinite number of universes containing an infinite amount of space-time, each of which is capable of spawning its own universes and so forth. If we do exist within a multiverse reality, then everything you do, every event that has ever occurred can and will happen. But this causes a problem when you’re trying to work out the probability of something.

Today, the average Indian stands a one in 430,000 chance of dying while getting out of bed, a one in 1.6 million chance of being hit by a meteorite, and a one in 175 million chance of winning the Powerball lottery. Sounds like quite a day? But if the multiverse theory is true your chances of all these things occurring to you or another you on a different multiverse level are one out of one dead certain, so what does this have to do with time? Well, to make calculating probabilities a little easier, I have come up with a mathematical approach called geometric cut-offs, and if you’re picturing a sassy pair of jean shorts, you’re sadly wrong. These cut-offs split the multiverse into different sections and move infinity from the equation helping us to calculate probabilities based on that one particular sample. Basically, if you wanted to know how many bloody syringes were in your local lake before you went swimming in it, you wouldn’t count them all. You’d take a square meter area count the ones in there and extrapolate that based on how big the lake is. But when these mathematical cut-offs are used to reduce time to a potential finite thing, we can calculate the probability of certain universe ending events happening with more accuracy and in the five scenarios calculated using this approach, a time had a definite ending in each and every one of them.

A Big Crunch

You’ve heard of the Big Bang but what about the Big Crunch? Sounds delicious, right? Wrong. The Big Crunch is a theoretical ending to the universe whereby everything that ever was and ever has been coalescing into one final singularity, an ultra-dense region where you Jupiter and giraffes are all smushed into a single point within which time according to physics ceases to exist. To get there, the universe would undergo a gradual process that takes place over tens of billions of years, just like the expansion of the Big Bang, except in Reverse during which time may even move backward. That’s morning dump you just took.

Prepare for re-entry and what’s crazy is that we may not even know that time was reversing because our perception of it would simply not change. We could be going in reverse right now, and some people believe we already are and that the universe is currently on a backward collision course heading straight towards the Big Crunch and the end of time.

However, this wouldn’t be the end of all time as it is also believed that another big bang would occur shortly after the Big Crunch has finished destroying the concept of personal space forever. This model sees our universe as a bubble that constantly grows and shrinks. It describes universes of time and space as things which blink in and out of existence. So while according to this theory, time certainly would end at some point. It wouldn’t necessarily be the end number to a perception of time. As human beings get older, a common complaint is that time seems to feel like it’s speeding up your 20s, going by in a whizz your 30s, or mere seconds. And before you know it, you’re soiling yourself in old folks home. And bam, you’re dead.

So why does this happen and could we ever manipulate this feeling?

I also believe that time feels like it’s speeding up as you age because you’re comparing it to the length of time you’ve existed. This is called proportionality theory, and it explains how a year in your 40s goes by faster because it is only one fortieth of the time you had been alive. That same period of time would be a whole quarter of a four-year-old life.

Hence, why they and other young people perceive it to be slower, but things that can be slowed can almost always be stopped, and it’s the same for things that speed up if the speed of something can be manipulated. Does that mean that there’s a trick we can pull on the human brain to make time slow down?

Again, perhaps even bringing the minds — the perception of time to a halt turns out there is. And it simply involves doing more stuff by taking in more of your surroundings, and deliberately engaging your consciousness. Psychologists have demonstrated that humans can completely master their own perception of time provided they are sufficiently aware that time is slower for kids because they enjoy more fresh and unique experiences. Since the world is entirely new to them, so if you want to slow down life, go outside and play right now.

Fear has also been proven to slow down our perception of reality, and this makes me wonder if one person was made hyper-aware in a room full of creepy clowns, how slow could you make time feel for them? And could you ever become so aware that time almost stops?

and there is the relative nature of time

We think of time as something which exists universally and which is experienced by everyone and everything in the same way. But that’s not true as time dilation shows us. According to special relativity, the faster you go, the slower time moves. Time dilation tells us that two objects moving at different speeds will experience time differently, and this was proven during the Hafele - Keating Experiment in 1971 when ultra-precise atomic clocks were taken onboard commercial airliners and flown around the world. When the times on these clocks were compared to an identical pair left on the ground, they showed that more time had elapsed for those on the ground than the ones left in the planes. A similar effect occurred when astronaut Scott Kelly was sent into space, while his twin brother Mark remained on Earth. Mark was already the slightly older sibling but upon Scott’s return the gap between them in age had stretched albeit by as little as eight point six milliseconds, but however small the effect is, this still demonstrates the incredible possibilities of time, and how it works differently throughout the universe depending on what you’re doing and how fast you’re moving. It means that to individual people or even millions and billions of people can conceivably experience time at vastly differing speeds, especially if one of them is lingering around a black hole where time is known to slow down almost to an end. And if you could somehow move at the speed of light, time would pretty much end — but that’s where things get interesting because as we said before, if something can be slowed, surely it can be stopped. Is there a large enough black hole, or other powerful objects somewhere in the universe that could bring time to a complete standstill? Who knows? Because we sure wouldn’t. If we were being influenced by one as if right now a giant invisible force influencing, the Earth started slowing down time to a trickle, tomorrow wouldn’t feel any different. But did you know there’s a truly mind-bending theory on the nature of time which we haven’t even mentioned yet? Because while some scientists believe that time lives Fords and others think it might be moving backward. There are some that think the time may not move at all, that time may be static that the past, the present, and the future all happening at once.

Time is an astonishing force which can be moving and stationary. It can be finite and infinite in a way that time is like a lake static and still with everything that ever was, is and will be all occurring at exactly the same time, instead of like a river always moving in the same direction.

This becomes more evident with relativity — your experience of time changes with your interaction with space. Therefore, a clock in a spaceship doesn’t experience time the same way you do on planet Earth. Similarly, to the extent you consider BBT to be the correct model for the beginning of the universe, time at the beginning was not the same as it is today — you would have experienced it differently if you were there to see it. To put it differently, there is only one for anyone to experience time — to record the change in some entity, be it a clock, a decaying atom or the propagation of EM waves. If everything in the universe simply stopped changing, you cannot experience time. So effectively, time ‘stops’. Similarly, if the universe started to implode on itself in a big crunch, time would still continue, because the universe continues to change.

Your experience of time, your interaction with space/matter, might possibly change.

• Nikhil Chandwani