Time

 Time is of the essence, but what is the essence of Time?

Two nouveaux riches were boasting loudly to each other over dinner. One says, "I have two Patek Philippe and three Omegas in my collection.” The other replies, “I have three Rolex watches and one antique pocket watch with a gold chain encrusted with diamonds, worth a fortune.” Both championed their respective watches' timekeeping. A third, obviously not so parvenu, and clearly not so moneyed, and avoiding the ‘look at me stuff’, chipped in, "How do you define time?" The two looked at each other and thought, ‘What a stupid question.’  Ignoring the stares, he went on, “Because it is invisible, is time real, or is it just an illusion?” followed by “What do your watches tell you about time”? To all questions, there was deafening silence.  

Well, let’s find out…

The difference between ‘what is the time’ and ‘what is time’ is ‘THE’. One would hardly ever think that one of the most frequently used words in the English language could have such significance in Philosophy, science, and more. That is, even though we place it before the noun TIME, a prominence we take for granted, and to which many of us don’t give a second thought.  Yet that single word regulates our lives in three primary ways: it orchestrates our biological clocks, structures our societal schedules, and influences our psychological perception of reality throughout our working and leisurely hours. With so much going for it, giving Time such prominence, yet researching for this article, I find no single definition of Time.  The nearest I have come to a rational explanation is that time is the measure we use to compare change against a regular physical process and call the resulting comparison "time." A label.  In this narrative, I search for a definition of time, but even if I do find it, it will, sure enough, prove controversial because, fundamentally, time is subjective for many and for the majority, its relativity is a given. So, if time is partly in the eye of the beholder, how do we explain, in the general sense, what time is?

Attempting to do that, this essay will have to come in two parts: ‘what is the time’ is clock time, the mechanistic time, the fundamental architecture, a human construct of unitary measure, attached to Newtonian theories that time is universal and absolute- it is the same for everyone everywhere, existing independently of us. The other part of ‘what is time?’ Is space-time, leading to a scientific and philosophical exploration that takes into account Einstein's theory of Relativity. His theories shattered the centuries-old idea that time is absolute; they show that time is interwoven with space and bends and dilates under the influence of speed and gravity. Adding more weight to this twentieth-century theory, time is defined by entropy (order) and its implications for biological ageing (disorder); within the arrow of time's flow, things become less tidy.  But more of that later.

My goodness, all that because of dropping the definite article ‘THE’? 

AI-generated image. Exploring time as illusion or reality through mechanistic and abstract forces,
the 'Elan Vital', an enduring life force.

When I was eight or nine years old, I loved collecting stamps.  I used to buy them in batches of hundreds, later separating them to help me navigate the chaotic bundle by country and date.  Other than hoping to find the elusive Penny Black, I was unconsciously building a timeline, separating the stamps into past and present, and making space in my album in anticipation of the future. I was creating the flow of time, and didn’t know it.  

That sense of continuity, the human perception, dates back to the Macedonian general, Seleucid period after the death of Alexander the Great. Before then, time was measured by such as dry summers, cold winters, echoing cycles of nature, wars, earthquakes, and so on.  Each event was geographically localised to make it easier to perceive one’s place in history.  Indeed, they are not really dates at all, but rather synchronisms between events.  The son of Seleucid did not restart the clock, and for the first time in history, historical time was marked by number by continuous flow.  It did not only recall the past but also, by correlating events, opened the way to a new kind of predictability. Almost every conceivable object- coins, documents, marriages, tombstones was marked by date. A period of history-making: every event must be chained to its place and time from then on. 

The Seleucid era inadvertently opened the gates of progress and proposed fundamentally new possibilities.  Fast forward, the tick-tock of time is no longer empty and irredeemable; it now has meaning. In fact, this arrow of time, formatted as a line of time, stretches its roots only to the eighteenth century.  It evolved from a grid-based display of history into a simpler timeline format.  At first, historians displayed time in the form of a grid, but around 1765, the scientist-philosopher Joseph Priestley invented what was arguably the world’s first modern timeline, showing a flow of time from left to right. The idea is now so entrenched in Western thought that it is difficult to imagine another way of presenting time.   Charles Darwin took this up in The Origin of Species, conceiving of evolution in linear terms as an arrow of progress and deriving the term "ancestral lineage" from the Latin Linea.

Indeed, the line of progress was measured along the line of time; the notion of progress went along in parallel.  For Victorians, belief in progress was impelled by rapid scientific and technological achievements.  Darwinism holds that, as with time in evolution, human development is a transitory stage, not an end product.  

Time does not stop there, but in line with the progressive ideas within that -ism ideology, the evolution of time brings us to the discovery of space-time.  Priestley’s time is now being presented in graphic and mathematical forms. We are onto space-time as the fourth dimension.  Other than what humans perceive of three-dimensional objects with length, width, and height, mathematicians have long thought of the presence of a fourth dimension in their attempt to identify time. In other words, Time is a dimension of space; it is only a line if taken by itself.  Yet we are still coming up short in our definition of Time.

Now time was of the essence, but what is the essence of time? It can be given or taken away, saved or spent, borrowed or beaten, kept or killed.  There are all kinds of timers: egg timers, old timers, time signals.  There are half-time and full-time, short-time and overtime, the best of times and the worst of times.  Time to be born as well as time to die. Time cures all things, yet corrodes all things. St. Augustine, Christian theologian and philosopher, is known to have said I know what time is, but if someone asks me, I cannot tell him. We do not know its nature, but we have an anxious sense of when it stands still or a wonderful sense when it passes.  Hey, we are running out of time; just look at the clock.

Along with the stirrup* (see below), gunpowder, and the printing press, mechanical clocks rank among the great inventions in human history, with momentous economic, social, political, and cultural consequences.  Humans like to measure things like time in hours, minutes, and seconds; distance in miles and kilometres; size and weight; and try to fit the entire universe into some measure. A tendency that probably originates from a combination of biology, psychology, and culture. Giving humans the ability to read patterns and predictability, perhaps read into the future.  

* How old?

* How fast?

* How heavy?

* How much money?

* How likely?

Meanwhile, the evolution progresses from medieval estimation to precision. The rise of railways and factories demanded more accurate timekeeping. Clocks speak of time as the universal language, the first step towards globalisation as we know it today. Simply by agreeing on a mechanistic system of measurement, society, from far away, can coordinate when a train leaves, or when a plane’s time of arrival.  Millions of people can coordinate their actions without knowing one another.  So the clock is not merely measuring time; it is synchronising human behaviour.  A clock takes this invisible, intangible thing and turns it into a sequence of numbers.

We take something that cannot be seen or held and turn it into:

  seconds → minutes → hours → days → years → centuries

As with other measurements, it gives us a sense of control and a comfortable, padded illusion.  We divide the cycles of nature into smaller increments —a macro of things—the metric of our existence.  I was, I am, and I will be.

* Farmers measured seasons to improve harvests.

* Sailors measured the stars to navigate oceans.

* Scientists measured electricity to harness it.

* Economists measure wealth to organise societies.

With the invention of increasingly precise clocks, time became something divisible, ownable, even tradable. We began speaking of:

* "saving time,"

* "wasting time,"

* "spending time,"

* "investing time."

 We treat time almost like money.  

The Sumerians of Mesopotamia, 5,000 years ago, invented a sexagesimal mathematical system for us, dividing the day into 24 hours, 60 minutes, and 60 seconds, applying it to the hitherto unmeasured universe.  They invented these units because continuous reality is easier to think about when broken into manageable chunks. It was not, as many assume, to harness nature but rather to understand it and organise their experiences.  They did not invent its sequence but invented a system to represent it and quantify the sequence of events.

Since then, we have built an entire civilisation around those divisions. We create working hours, school hours, and opening hours; we set deadlines, make appointments, mark birthdays and anniversaries, and create calendars and timetables.  

That is clock time, but the clock still ticks on LIVED time, where we become deluded by contradictions between the real and the not-so-real.  An hour waiting for bad news can feel like a day, while an hour of fun disappears almost instantly.  

There is measured time and an experience of time. That's the time that exists in consciousness—the feeling of waiting, remembering, anticipating, ageing, regretting and hoping.  Sometimes, twenty minutes can feel like eternity, whereas other times, “where did those two hours go”? A remarkable feeling in understanding the concept of time, as lived experience and as to whether it is embedded in our consciousness.  So much so, one might suggest that, in a sense, time is merely an illusion.  

On the other hand, a time one forgets and a time one remembers, giving a sense of time's dimensions: past, present, and future.  In a sense, that defines the structure of our existence. A continuity of ordering of change in parallel to the dynamics of the universe, riding the ever-moving arrow of time, without an option to exit. 

Our mental default?. Experience reality strictly in a sequential, forward flow. We see each present in isolation. Lived Time.

 Along that continuity sits one of the most fundamental concepts in physics and philosophy.  In physics, time is treated as a dimension. In Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, space and time are woven together into spacetime. In thermodynamics, the "arrow of time" comes from the tendency of entropy (a measure of disorder or change) to increase as time moves forward. A concept of the very organised order of the universe and its Big Bang to the disorder of today, unspooling along a cinematographic timeline.  This explains why we remember the past but not the future, and why many everyday processes seem irreversible because we only remember what has happened.  Moreover, our memories help define who we are; other thoughts reach toward what we might become.  

         

Interestingly, if we move backwards, we get younger but unlearn all that we know- the fiction of time travel. I am not going there, though; that is a whole subject all of its own.

The famous scientist Einstein profoundly changed man’s ideas of time, overturning Newton's notion that time is absolute and universal, which had stood for centuries, and replacing it with the idea that time is relative. But what does that mean? It can speed up or slow down depending on how fast you are travelling.

As I understand it, in more detail, according to his theory, the faster you move relative to me, the slower time will pass for you relative to my perception of time.  Time passes more slowly for a moving object when compared to a stationary observer. In its simplest form, a man standing on a train platform sees a person on a moving train appear to move faster than a person on the platform observing the train. This is, or its more complicated cousin, what science calls time dilation.

Before Einstein, it was common to think of space and time as separate things.  Space is where something is, while time is when something happens. Einstein’s theories enabled scientists to picture the universe in a new way: as a static, four-dimensional block, with three spatial dimensions (height, width, and depth) and time as the fourth. This block contains all of space and time simultaneously – and time doesn’t flow. There is no before and after, no right and left.  There’s no special now in the block – what appears to be the present to one observer is simply the past to another (Presentism).  Moreover, Time is also interwoven with space into “spacetime”. The idea of spacetime is related to gravitational pull: the higher one is in space, the slower one ages.  So, Christine, living on the top floor of the Shard, will live longer than Margaret, living on the ground floor—one way of avoiding costly face-lifts.

Whereas in philosophy, the scholarly fraternity is still arguing over how to come up with a plausible definition, and whether time exists or is merely an illusion or whether time goes forward or backwards. They are still struggling to find a definition. 

Well, there you are; taking all that I have narrated into account, are we nearer to a definition?  To my reckoning, we got lost in translation, especially after the last bit, which, for many of us, would prove a very slippery slope. But, beautifying aside, what really defines time in this day and age is Money and the distinction between Time and Hour being increasingly modelled on Economics.  Forget Science, philosophy, and their mysterious surroundings; more than ever,  today we live by the hour.  We cost and pay by the hour and measure speed by the hour.  More than anything, economics defines our Time. Economics so dominates our lives, almost like money.  "Come on, come on, time is money..." The language we use often exposes assumptions we're not consciously aware of: “I have no time to lose”, "She's investing her time wisely." as if Time is a finite commodity. Life became exchangeable for wages, hour by hour.  Symbolically, one hour of your finite existence has been assigned a market value.  Yet, sitting beside someone you love without saying much remains a time to treasure.

As a conclusion, I leave you with this passage I copied ad verbatim.  "...we come to the conclusion that our senses can fool us, but it is through evidence from the senses that we have come to that conclusion.  The realisation lead to a sophisticated philosophical understanding of how we come to know things about the world: not by trusting our senses naively, but by testing our  thoughts of how the world works empirically [...] our internal perception of the passage of time is an area owned by cognitive science and philosophy.  The exterior world is traditionally the playground of physics."- Gene Tracy, Chancellor Professor of Physics Emeritus at William & Mary in Virginia, USA

Time, gentlemen, please, drink up; it is closing time.

*= The stirrup is considered one of history's greatest inventions because it permanently merged rider and horse into a single combat and transport unit. Securing the feet gave riders total balance and stability. This simple device revolutionised warfare, created empires, and shaped medieval society (Wikipedia).