Skip to main content

Time as human invention


I am sitting at my desk with an hourglass beside me. The sand through the neck for 30 minutes when set. The history of timekeeping dates back to ancient civilisations watching the stars and planets to make decisions on when to sow and reap, when to hunt and gather. In mathematical terms, time can be defined as the ongoing and continuous sequence of events that occur in succession from the past to the present to the future, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. 

Our lives are driven by time. We work to get things done on time - what people are paid to work is based on time and the 40 hour working week. We sleep and wake according to the time of day or night. We allocate time for work and play. We share our time with others. We manage our interactions with others based on time. Some say that all we are born with is time.

But, isn’t time a human construct? Is there any ‘time’? There are seasons, there are cycles driven by our location in the universe. Our lives are transient - we are born, we live a life and then we pass away as life goes on. 

Is time a thing? Or is it an invention created by man to manage work and provide impetus to manage our activity? When you are on holiday and unwinding, time becomes far less relevant. We are still active but we care much less about the time of day or night. 

According to theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of it’s flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality… he posits that reality is a complex network of events into which we project sequences of past, present and future. Einstein stated ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. 

As we age, the relativity of time takes on a new look. A day seems far shorter than as a child. I go to bed, fall asleep and almost in an instant I am awake and climbing into the new day. 

Does time really matter? 

Is it time for new thinking to take humanity beyond this stubborn illusion. Is it time for society to re-think how we live and how we support one another with activity and outcomes as a focus rather than time.. 

The sands of time keep flowing after all..




Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas & Looking Forwards

Happy Christmas to those who have arrived here to read this post. The world and the media remind us often that Christmas is a time for giving, for compassion, for family, for celebrating Jesus and for receiving. It is also a time when we reflect on the past year - what has occurred and happened in our lives and where we have come. The New Year beckons and we begin to look forward to the positive changes that we desire, our aspirations and hopes for the future. We want to feel better in ourselves, and have an improved world with less stress, anxiety and suffering. Looking forwards is a powerful thing. It provides us with the ability to consider what may be, as we journey into the unknown. It enables us to work out where we would like things to go. In the animal kingdom, I expect we are one of very very few species that have this ability to look out over long periods of time. Other animals will look forwards I expect season by season, if that. They concentrate on the present. ...
5 comments
Read more

The pace of life

As we begin the Christmas season around this beautiful world, a period of reflection often occurs. Christmas (for most of the western world) is a time when we think about the year gone by, and about how far we have come along the road, and then we turn to the new year and begin to think about how far we are going to go and what we are going to do with our time next year. We all live life at different paces, sometimes we move quickly, at other times more slowly. We each choose how fast we want to move, making decisions that alter our progress and that sometimes take us in different directions. Sometimes those decisions help us gather momentum, at other times we lose it. That got me to thinking about physics...I was never really any good at school physics, I think the highest exam mark I ever got was around 40% despite the attempts of some very good teachers!, and the lowest was somewhere in the teens ....now a few years on from school, the querky reality is how much physics i...
2 comments
Read more

Pathways

The other day I found a piece of paper that I'd created with my best friend a few years ago, and it reminded me of how simple things are when we want them to be. We travel along our path, experiencing this and that - hearing and seeing this and that, and along that pathway we make decisions. Those decisions keep us moving, either in the same direction or in another. Like travelling along a road, we sometimes know our way, we recognise the road - it's a well travelled road as they say - we know where we are going because we have been there before. At other times we see signposts and respond to what they are telling us - we react to them and alter our direction based on what they say. At other times, we register signposts to give us confidence that we are on the right track, we experience 'deja vu' or coincidences we just get that intuitive feeling that we are moving in exactly the right direction. I think this simple little topic is going into my book. Have a gre...
1 comment
Read more