No purpose and no meaning, I'm afraid. As far as we know, it's just one of the fundamental properties of the universe.
"Purpose" is not applicable, as time wasn't deliberately created. It just is.
As for meaning: If you look at all of space/time/dimensions as one big soup. We are creatures of time. It is special to us because we move along it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
For example, quantum entanglement happens at once.
So that you'll know that the food you ordered is late.
Why do you assume there is one?
My simplistic answer, time exists so we can quantify change. In a static universe without time, could there be any change? Without change, there is no life.
universe without time, could there be any change?
Yes, but it would not be change as we know it. Change would look diifferent.
What could it be then? Or is this just poetry?
What
I don't think we have an easy word for it.
We are living in time, so it is difficult to imagine how things look like outside of time.
Fair enough.
That's a very interesting hypothesis…
Imagine all moments of your life existing as a continuum- like a movie. When you don't watch the movie, it still exists and there are still changes - the beginning is different from the end. But the changes are spatial, not temporal. It's more like a painting that you can admire as a whole. Does that mean there's no life? I really don't know.
It's a way to describe that one thing can cause another thing to happen and that from our perspective this doesn't happen instantaneously.
Time exists in the same way that numbers do. It's just a definition that allows us to tell things apart. Time and numbers don't exist by themselves, but the definition will always be necessary to describe things that do exist.
Even the most simple description implies time and quantity. F.i. the sentence "apple is red" doesn't mention the time or quantity directly, but the word "is" implies both time (present) and quantity (singular) and existence.
Saying only "red apple" doesn't imply existence, so we can't say that it describes anything that exists.
So the purpose of the human invention of the time concept is to describe existence. The meaning is dependant on what definition you use.
Are you sure that cause and effect always need time?
No, only to things moving slower than light.
Meetings
A way of measuring events, relative to gravity.
See: Entropy.
An artificial construct to give our lives structure based on a planetary alignments.
In my world, artificial means man made. But time is surely not man made.
Time as a concept is man made. I am unaware of any other animal who tracks time like we do.
