Time
We live time like a narrative. But as with any story, not every episode unfolds at the same pace. A single instant can seem frozen, trapping us between the sense of beginning and end. Then again, whole decades might fly.
Is time better measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, a life… or in the significance of the moment? Does this phenomenon we call time even exist, or is it just an essential illusion?
I
t drags, it flies, we waste it, we save it. We find ourselves ahead of it, and also behind it. We place limits on it, catch things in the nick of it, save stitches by dint of it, we even have keepers for it – but what is it really?
We know that it’s a hard taskmaster. The consequences of neglect can range from minor to life-threatening, but there are always consequences. Cinderella lost a shoe and a coach and almost her prince because of it. (Putting at risk her future in favor of a present which immediately became past – sound familiar?) It figures as a title for popular songs, including (according to some) the greatest of all, As Time Goes By. And this is how we see it – going by. But what is going by? And while we’re on that, where did it come from and where exactly is it going?
It seems intuitively so that memory and time are inseparable in making sense of each other.
The ancient Greeks linked it to the mystery of change, that strange capacity of things to become different while remaining the same. (“You cannot step twice into the same river” said Heraclitus.) In which case, must it not also be suspended in memory, for how else can we know how things were? It seems intuitively so that memory and time are inseparable in making sense of each other. Except that the hourglass notion of time – the future becoming the present on its way to being the past – is under philosophical and scientific assault. And with it the very concept of a separated past, present and future, embodiments of that inexorable, moving time that seems to be captured in our memories.
The physicists will battle out their ideas, under the banners of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, with the neurophysiologists and psychologists joining in the fray, and biologists providing the wildcards – while we observe and scribble from the sideline. For the secrets that time is already giving up are too fascinating not to reflect on now. And rest assured The Secret World of Time will continue to follow events as they emerge, and report on their developments – all in the course of time.
