listening to the In Our Time podcast this morning, all about time, our conception of it, or perception of it…heady stuff for the subway ride in, makes me wanna ditch work something awful…
good philosophical puzzler in there: if the universe was empty, if there was no "thing" in the universe, no "stuff", would there still be time? it’s great to hear the host get more and more confused as the podcast goes on and gets into stranger concepts…
reminds me of something I used to get into when talking about hallucinations, the fact that we are all experiencing hallucinations ALL THE TIME, that we aren’t seeing the sun, we are seeing light that is 8 minutes old, that the stars we see are apparitions of stars (some long gone), that we don’t actually see any objects, we see the light reflected by matter (i.e., we’re seeing what those objects don’t absorb, or what they AREN’T, not what they ARE), that when you get down to some quantum physics, particles move backwards in time, etc ad infinitum.
Great ideas. I believe time is a man made invention of measurement. It was created to put some understanding into things we can’t. Space, life, phenomenon. And we’re always trying to beat it. Breaking records, time is money, etc. I like to think there is no time. Everything exists in the now.
awesome, good stuff, i gotta get that podcast….esp like the hallucination bit in regards to seeing the sun from 8 minutes ago….was just sittin here thinkin about all this, heady stuff indeed, started to also think about “time” and its definition and realized its one of those words that is used all the time and the exact definition does not come easily to my mind…so i looked it up….and here for reference it is
noun: the continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past
noun: a person’s experience on a particular occasion
Example: “He had a time holding back the tears”
noun: an instance or single occasion for some event
Example: “This time he succeeded”
noun: an indefinite period (usually marked by specific attributes or activities)
Example: “He waited a long time”
noun: a suitable moment
Example: “It is time to go”
noun: a period of time considered as a resource under your control and sufficient to accomplish something
Example: “Take time to smell the roses”
noun: the time as given by a clock
Example: “Do you know what time it is?”
noun: the fourth coordinate that is required (along with three spatial dimensions) to specify a physical event
noun: rhythm as given by division into parts of equal time
noun: the period of time a prisoner is imprisoned
Example: “He is doing time in the county jail”
verb: adjust so that a force is applied an an action occurs at the desired time
Example: “The good player times his swing so as to hit the ball squarely”
verb: regulate or set the time of
Example: “Time the clock”
verb: assign a time for an activity or event
Example: “The candidate carefully timed his appearance at the disaster scene”
verb: set the speed, duration, or execution of
Example: “We time the process to manufacture our cars very precisely”
verb: measure the time or duration of an event or action or the person who performs an action in a certain period of time
that’s a lot of definitions…I would like to somehow see them all used in one sentence…