Greta wrote:Certainly time at present relies on orbits, rotations and decays.
Hi Greta, sorry, but this is backwards. Orbits, rotations and decays rely on 'time'. Without 'time', motions, events, or happenings of any kind, could not '
occur'.
Greta wrote:However, what would have marked time in the early universe before the first atoms formed? Perhaps the spin or decay type or rate of subatomic particles.
Atoms/particles cannot form, spin, or decay, etc without the pre-existence of time. NOTHING can happen WITHOUT time.
Greta wrote:How about before the big bang? Now it's speculative territory, of course. It's posited that there was the quantum foam, populated by self annihilating virtual particles - immediately dissipating ripples in the fabric of reality (or maybe those perturbations are reality?). Presumably there would have been a time frame for these self-annihilating flickers.
Yes. None of this could have happened/occurred without the pre-existence of time.
Again, time cannot be created. If time exists, then it has "
ALWAYS EXISTED" (i.e. was NOT caused/created). Although this may be unpalatable to some, it is the ONLY logical possibility.
BigBango wrote:Happenings only happen after we are "consciousness" of ourselves as physical objects.
...and yet the "consciousness of ourselves" can only happen within the (pre-) existence of time.