What is TIME?
April 22, 2012
Ok, now… let’s
talk about the time.
What do we
really understand by time?
For most
of us time is something on shelf or on our wrist. Pushed, we might take the
subject a little further than this and say time has something to do with the
day and night and the sunh and monn and stars. But if these elementary notions
of time in terms of astronomy are basically correct, has not astronomy then to
do with space rather than time? Surely our concept of times derives from the
fact that we go round the sun, calling one complete revolution a solar year,
and one complete turning of the earth on itself, or on its axis, a day and
ninght. This turning, for convenience’s sake we divide into twenty four units
that call hours.
But are
these not completely artficials divisions?
Are that
not an effect of time?
Have we
ever seen an hour or a day?
Can we
think of an houror day as something apart from a clock face or calendar
Does time
in fact exist at all?
True, we
hae memory of something that happened yesterday, or last year our holidays for
example but has this anything t do with time?
Can we not
instead say the earth kappened to be a different place in relation to the sun,
and in process of completing a different orbit; not this one we are on now, at
any rate.
Has time
something to do with difference, the; is, in fact, this what time is as all
about?
Who really
know? Like money, perhaps the most we can say about time (as we treat it) is
that it is a very useful way of dealing with a relationship that we must all
enterinto. But initself, the real meaningof time,is as elusive as ever.
Surely the
same thing is apparent in the very language we use to refer to time.
What do we
say about time? Indeed, what don’t we say about time? We spare it, we save it,
we lose it, we find it and we keep it,
we tell it, we make it and idiomatically those of us who break the law, do it.
And in actual fact, literally, do we do any of this things at all?
We say we
save time, but what do we mean by save?
That we
collect it and put it inn a little glass tube like anhours glass or egg timer?
No, we mean we do something quicker than we might otherwise have done it.
What do we
mean by to spare the time?
That time
has been condemned to die and mercifully we allow it to live?No, but that we
can , or cannot, make or find the time necessary to do something in. and to
lose time you cannot find your watch or egg timer? No, you are spending or
wasting time you cannot afforf to waste instead of getting onwith whatever it
is you should be getting on with.
All of
which leavesus where with regard to time? Are we any wiser coming our than we
were going in? It would seem not, and perhaps not until time itself or space or
whatever it is that is eluding us, stands still and explains its mystery, shall
we be so…
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