What is it to stop time?
To understand what stopping time involves, we have to first grasp how time works. To those of us in everyday experience, the easy givens of time will be that time flows in one direction alone, forward, and we measure it through changes or events that occur sequentially, such as the ticking of a clock or the rising of the sun.
But time is about far more than merely a sequence of events. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is inextricably entwined with space to form spacetime. This means that time doesn’t exist independently; it exists because the universe is moving and because matter has energy. When people picture time halting in freeze-framed action like a stilled video, in fact, things would get much, much worse-and much, much scarier.
