If I were to ask you, “What time is it?” chances are you would look down at your wrist watch or hit the home screen on your phone to light up the time stamp and give me a set of numbers. But what if I asked you, “What is time?”… what would your answer be then? The best I could come up with when I first thought about the concept of ‘what is time’ was, “A unit of measure we as humans use to keep track and organize events in our collective history." But is this unit of measure universal and if not is there some way to make it such? Otherwise what is the point of keeping track of events if there was no way in organizing them in relation to other events if the corresponding events were using a different unit of measure? But the fact that time can and has existed in different areas by different cultures in different ways immediately tells us time is an inconsistent, relative unit of measure who’s properties are undefinable yet crucial to our entire species. Ok, that may be a bold statement, but you get my drift. Every culture, has found some way of keeping track of the history of their culture by measuring ‘time’ in some sense; tracking the Sun, its shadows, the stars, planetary motion, even seasonally with changes in weather (farmers basing crop planting and harvests off of the seasons). One of the most interesting aspects of time however, is when you think about it, there really is no right or wrong way to keep track of time, nor is it absolutely necessary you understand what time is in order to keep track of it. Let’s explore an example.
Aristotelian explanation of the universe held a geocentric model to be truth. With Earth as its center, the Sun, stars and other heavenly bodies moved around it. Several examples were proposed in order to explain and provide proof for a geocentric model, such as Plato’s student Eudoxus who argued a model with concentric spheres, like layers of an onion with Earth being at the center, made the most sense as to why the celestial bodies moved the way they did. “Each sphere rotated uniformity, but each planet received the combined motion of several spheres, that added up (approximately) to the observed motion.” (Principe, p.42). This was the held belief by most people in the 16th Century, including the Catholic Church. This belief held until challenged by Copernicus who proposed a heliocentric universe, which also eventually solved a major issue with the accepted geocentric model, retrograde of the planets. So how is it that an entire culture can believe in a model of the universe and use it to keep ‘time’ (days with sunrise and sunsets, months, seasonal changes Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, etc.) when their primary model in which all this is founded on is fundamentally wrong?
It is my belief that time is relative, and that is because we cannot move in the dimension of time like we can in the other three dimensions we live in (up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards). “Time makes us all a prisoner of the present, forever transitioning from our own past into an unknown future …” Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yet we need time in order to explain our presence. You would never give a meeting place without a time, or tell a friend to meet you at 5pm without giving a location. All four coordinates (x, y, z, t) must be known. So what is it about time that makes it special?
Philosophers and physicists have been trying to answer this question for ages. During this quest, humans have discovered one ‘standard’ of time. It always seems to move forward, never backwards, at least for us. But that does not mean that is the only way to be influenced by time. In the documentary Time: Cosmic Time with Michio Kaku, Dr Kaku explains according to physics, it is possible for time to move backwards, we just don’t know why it moves forwards for us.
After reviewing my readings for this semester, my biggest take away was this idea of time being a fourth dimension that was are only partial apart of. This is such an abstract idea for me to grasp. Most of the books that dive into this concept more are way over my head, but the thought that 16th century humans developed a cohesive unit to measure this fourth dimension (time) off of a false model of the universe shows me you can think you know something, but in actuality you have no idea what is really true.
Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2005.
Principe, Lawrence. The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2011.
Time- BBC: Cosmic Time.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dey0rPTkLzM&list=PL03F2D49431E2A889&index=19. Accessed 10 Dec 2017.
"a fourth dimension that was are only partial apart of"-maybe take another stab at this formulation? I can't quite grasp what you're saying.
ReplyDeleteBut, as to your larger point about the elusiveness of our concept of time, Augustine put it most succinctly: "What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." And that's why I tend to slip into transcendentalist symbolism when someone presses me for an answer as to the nature of time. It's just "the stream I go a'fishin' in"... make of THAT what you will.
Augustine continued: "I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time." So what may we conclude, if we believe that history, the present, and the future are all real? That something real also corresponds to our notion of time, though we may never have time enough to spell it out. But what fun (if you want to call it that) we can have at the spelling bee!
So here are some more texts to dive into, should you wish to pursue the subject... and if you can spare the time.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/10/17/7-must-read-books-on-time/