Time is an illusion, lunch time, doubly so.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
318 points (96.0% liked)
Comic Strips
21141 readers
1984 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The lack of chins is disturbing.
Americans need representation somewhere, you know
Its chin all the way down, baby.
I think that's called "balls"
ah, you mean Thanos !
inhales
Time is a metaphor, a human construct that we've devised to explain how the quantum entanglements affect us. It's like how we use color as a way to describe how we sense a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with our optical organs. Neither time nor color are "real" in the sense that you can find a physical atom of it, but still useful language to describe how we interact with the world around us.
Reminds me of Hawking's quote, never read the book so might be out of context, but I remember hearing it and thinking
This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like. But according to the approach I described in Chapter 1, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description. ― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
It doesn't matter if time isn't real, we are bound to it anyway.
All five dimensions (three space, one time, one probability) exist as a solid unchanging block, an enormous, incomprehensible overarching solution to some equally enormous, incomprehensible mathematical equation.
And if you look at it from one particular direction it almost certainly looks like forty-two.
This sounds like an idea called "eternalism" or "block time". I tend to suspect it might be the case just because it requires assuming fewer unique properties for the time dimension that aren't shared by space dimensions, but obviously that's not really evidence for it as such. It can be an interesting idea to think through the implications of though, whether true or not.
I really tried to understand how people obviously a lot more intelligent than I am actually believe this kind is stuff. It really breaks down for me when claims are made that past, present (debated now), and more specifically future is different based on the observer. Like yeah, it takes time for signals to travel, that in no way means something that hasn’t happened already has. We can observe things in the past, we can’t observe anything in the future. There’s no evidence that anything can be viewed in the future, it doesn’t make any practical sense to me.
So, what you're talking about (the past and future appearing different to different observers) sounds like a different concept to what this comic was about; if im understanding your meaning, that's something that comes up from relativity, and as such has a bit more grounding to it than any position on if other points in time exist somewhere else along a "time axis" already or if the future is truly unwritten. Either position on the nature of time will result in a universe that looks exactly the same from our perspective, and therefore can only be speculated on, but relativity makes physically testable predictions that can be experimentally verified. I can't really explain it adequately as I only understand the basics myself (though from what I know, nobody ever actually observes the future, its more that different observers see the time between connected events compressed compared to others).
For context this is one of the videos I watched that got me trying to understand, I’m not even sure I know enough to properly explain, it just didn’t sound reasonable to me. Like a lot of mental level flaws that makes me think I’m just not smart enough to understand.
I do appreciate the response, thank you!
Can confirm...
Nice. Pass it on, man.
It's a 5 dimensional crystal, our experience is simply the refracted result of all matter/energy in the universe swirling about like water through a stream...
So we can all feel validated in our disappointment that our experience frequently feels like mild constipation while trying to figure out which, if any, of the yogurts offers decent nutrition and probiotics at an affordable price because your body f'n hates lettuce, which your friend tells you the doctor will tell you to eat more of and you should go see the doctor, but doctors are expensive and your insurance is a confusing pile of long-ass 20 page letters containing word salad drenched in legalese, each one telling you you are no-longer with this group, but now you are with that group and you don't even know where your doctor's office is anymore