Does Time Actually Exist?

As ludicrous as the question sounds, it is a legitimate one that is now raging through the scientific community.  Even though we as humans may "experience" time, this does not mean it is part of the fundamental fabric of reality.  It could very well be another trick of our intuition - an illusion created by the limitations of our biology.

The "time" we are concerned with here is not the tool we use to splice up the day into hours or use to count how long a race takes. It is well known that this "time" is an arbitrary human creation that is used as a simplification and organizational device. In this way, "time" really is like "money". Money is a human creation with no inherent value that was injected into commerce to give a centralized system of value to all goods. Before money, people valued goods in terms of others goods: two deer skins was worth seven bushels of corn, which was worth eight and a half pars of shoes, etc. Similarly, we can view events of duration in this way: 45 heartbeats equals .063 rotations of the earth equals 1/10th of a plane ride from New York to California, etc. We can describe all of the happenings of the world in terms of one another without invoking "time", but obviously centralizing all of these events in terms of a common unit of measure removes a great deal of messiness and complexity. But this is not the time we are talking about.

Many of the physical laws that govern our universe exhibit what is called "time symmetry", in that they work and make sense both forward and backward in time. This is the logical equivalent of stating that time is irrelevant in these laws. Consider the following example:

"What if you record somebody simply dropping a ball? It falls for a meter and stops. Certainly someone watching this recording in reverse would notice an unrealistic discrepancy: a ball falling upward! But imagine the forward-recording carefully. When the ball lands, its kinetic energy is dispersed into sound, shaking the ground, and some heat. That is what allows the ball to be moving one moment and still the next. Now think of the recording in reverse. Those sound waves, those ground vibrations, and that heat, are all rushing back into the ball, imparting just enough energy to propel it upward into the person's hand. With this understanding, the backward recording appears perfectly realistic." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

There are even deeper reasons why physicists are becoming skeptical of time's existence. Most impossible to ignore is that, coupled with every modern scientific revolution, there has been a quiet revolution in our conception of time.  In Newtonian classical physics, time was viewed as an absolute concept, which flowed equally for all observers - that independent of everything was some master clock of the universe that was synchronized everywhere and for everyone. Then came Einstein with Special Relativity, which postulated that time was a relative concept, and depended upon the nature of the observer (namely his speed). He was able to show with a famous thought experiment that two events which appear simultaneously to one observer do not necessarily appear simultaneously to a second observer. This has nothing to do with human subjectivity, but purely with the intrinsic nature of reality.

Chances are that our conception of time will be altered again in the near future - maybe even eliminated.  Some physicists believe that eliminating time from our understanding of the universe is the key to unifying the presently irreconcilable theories of physical reality, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, into a grand "Theory of Everything".