Does time affect matter or does matter affect time?

Answer 1

If you subscribe to the Steve Hawking school of thought, then basically time does affect matter, but matter cannot effect time. One of the universal laws that is a major pillar of modern theoretical physics is known as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Simply put, it states that over time, entropy, or disorder, only increases over time, and never decreases. Basically, as the universe expands (as it is doing now and for the last 15 billion years or so), there can only be more disorder and never less. If you have a messy desk and take some time to straighten it up and organize it well, you have lessened the dissorder on your desk, but you have increased the disorder in your body and around you by using fuel in your body to produce the energy to move your arms to straighten your desk. This also produces heat around you which causes the molecules in the air near you to become more disordered. If matter becomes more disordered over time, then time is affecting matter. The only way matter can affect time is at a singularity, or the center of a black hole where all physics that we know of break down. One can say time is affected here because time basically does not exist here. Gravity is just too strong at a singularity for anything as we know it to continue on a "world path" or time, except the singularity itself. It's a the point of a singularity that Hawkin suggested "wormholes" could possibly exist. These would be tunnels through time but it's not clear if one could ever exist in one to travel in time.