Meanderings on Time: Physical Time

The New Year is significant to most of us because it signifies an end and a new beginning. So for most of us, the ending of an old year means looking back and reflecting or hind-sighting on what happened within the passing year. We take time to take a look at the good things, achievements, and even the failures that transpired in the last year.

We make assessment and we make resolutions for we believe that we cannot change what happened in the past be it good or bad, but we could make changes for the coming 365 ¼ days; every new year is a new beginning.

Of course this is a stupid idea, but who cares...

an hourglass...primitive clock

But what is time?

Time is how we measure the passing of events and how we organize these sequence of events. Time is measured in hour, minutes and seconds, and with today’s technology, time can even measured to smaller units like the millisecond. It is also measured in days, weeks, months, years, decade, millenniums, and etc. We may have different time zones, different clock settings but basically we all have grasp of this definition of time. 

With the invention of the clock, our conception of time has become related to speed. We think of time as directly related to movement like production, schedules, plans, trips etc. Time is a unit just like any other unit by which we measure things like the gram, meter, inches and feet if you’re an American, or as a basis from which we compute things like profit, speed, velocity, etc. This is our shared understanding of time, the physical time. So, this is time for most of us:

      1.       Born on _____________.

      2.       Study for _______________.

      3.       Go to work at __:__ then leave work at __:__.  

      4.       Go to church on ________.

      5.       Celebrate birthdays on _______________.

      6.       Get married on _________________.

      7.       Retire on ____________________.

      8.       Die on ______________________.
    
      Of course we do not know the exact time for all the items in the list, but they are pretty much determined.

      A big schedule!

People waiting for their train schedule in China. Looks like they are wprshipping the god of time.

I think with the invention of the clock, our whole understanding of existence and being changed dramatically: we have become the slave of time. I was reflecting upon the never ending debate about determinism versus freedom, but I think one of the factors that favors determinism (in all its shade) is when we have all become slaves of physical time, hence, even the freedom we think we have is even more belittled by the imposition of schedules upon us by physical time. Though we think we have freedom, but in reality we have lost all that freedom that we think we have when our lives, even to the minutest details, are subject to schedules.

Of course physical time is concerned with measurement and measurement is limitation. Anyway, time has become a factor in measurement and this is the common conception productivity: production x labor x time x interest x etc. : time is money.

Since the industrial revolution...our conception of time.

This, I think, is one of the reasons why the study of the humanities, the arts, the process of reflection, philosophizing, all other creative and conceptual activities are treated with contempt by people who understood time in terms of physical and financial productivity. This fact is lamented by educators because most of the curriculum created today focuses on production and productivity thus relegating the arts and the study of the humanities into the backseat. It can be said that the soul of human study is slowly being killed by the study for the quest for the continuing improvement of productivity. Introspection, reflection. philosophizing, conceptual creativity...creativity, they are second to useless in this age utilitarianism.

Anyway…where am I?

So, Time is something (for lack of better and understandable term) that is outside us. Its invention,  mean the measurement of  physical time, is a way for us of understanding and relating to the physical world around us, from going to school to observing atoms.

Time is a factor.

I imagine time as a conveyor belt that moves us from one place in time to another place in time. 

So for me (or for us) time is linear, ever moving forward but our consciousness of it is measured by the present.

Time is a conveyor belt that brings us to the end of our journey: death. Of course we believe that death is a way of bringing us outside the conveyor belt into timelessness or into an infinite conveyor belt but is not subjected to the physical deterioration of the movement from one point to another. You know, I think, sometimes annihilation is much, much better.

And what is that present?

Day? Hour? Minutes? Seconds?

Paul Tillich said it very well:

  The moment we say, “This is the present,” the moment has already been swallowed by the past. The present disappears the very instant we grasp it. The present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems we have nothing real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. Therefore there is a dreaming character about our existence…

Dali's painting says it all...

 Crazy ha...