“What then is time? If no-one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” St Augustine
“Time is what prevents everything happening at once” Ray Cummings
“Time is what clocks measure”
Time
I try to read a lot of books. Some are page turners, like Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher series and other detective fiction, and some history, and science books, especially physics and biology (written for the layman, like me). Recently I read Frank Wilczek’s Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality and he has a wonderful chapter on Time. He is a Nobel Prize winner and writes a very readable column in the Wall Street Journal, which is where I discovered him. This blog shares some thoughts found in that book and Matthew Hutson’s review of the Clock Mirage by Joseph Mazur.
There is lots of time, and time is short. Not enough time to get our things done, or barely, and billions of years of time in the cosmos. The whole of humanity is but a flash compared to the age of the universe, but some weeks seem to last forever. We can move around in space, both our in our living room, and some have moved in outer space. But we cannot move around in time.
Frank says that “time is the drummer to which change marches”. There are cycles in everything- night and day, seasons, the moon and earths orbits, the sprinklers in our yards, which repeat. Then there is music and its beat. We sing and dance to the passage of time, and different time signatures. If we cannot share the same rhythm (time), then we cannot share fully the same song, at least enjoyably! And the passage of our lives represents time, our growing up and developing at pretty similar rates between people. Said a different way, “Time is what clocks measure, and everything that changes is a clock.”
Measuring time is what we do. Whether it is our watches, or calendars, or written history, and planning ahead for events. Someone thought up our years to be labeled B.C. or A.D. just so we could have a history, or at least know more about it, like “when”. We read about history and might enjoy certain events, but we like to know when they happened. It helps us know that they happened at all in some ways. Like if we know when, then maybe it helps us know it really did.
We can measure ancient time is through radioactive dating so we can know more about civilizations by know when they happened. We all have heard about that kind of dating involving an isotope of Carbon (Carbon14). And the discussion of how it works is too long to go into here, but if you have a few minutes sometime, look up how it works. It is fascinating to know that even the atoms in our bodies, and ancient bodies, keep track of time. And through the orderly decay of certain of those atoms we can guess when the Neanderthals lived, when the Egyptians lived and flourished. For older dating, we can use uranium or lead isotopes, or other elements that decay on specific time frames. From this we can infer the age of the Earth, 3.6 billion years, which makes up about a quarter of the age of the universe.
But getting back to clocks, Mazur writes “to measure time there must be something to count” and basically says that clocks do not measure time but count events that have a relationship to time. Time measurement has been around a long time- sun dials and hourglasses, among other methods, and then Galileo and others developed pendulum clocks which were used until the 20th century as the best in accuracy. Then pendulums and unwinding springs were replaced by vibrating crystals, and then for the most accurate: vibrating atoms, which is what atomic clocks are based on. These clocks are super precise with estimates of losing a second or two in a million years. This accuracy is used in the Global Positioning System(GPS), for instance, which I have always wondered how that system works.
And then Einstein comes along and says it is all relative and developed the idea of space-time wherein time is affected by velocity and by gravity, at least on a cosmological scale, and who knows where else. Scientists have been able to verify his theory that time depends on the position and speed of the viewer and that being measured. So what we thought was a kind of absolute, turns out to be variable in certain ways. The speed of light seems to be the only absolute left, but that may change, or has already.
Certainly our perception of the passage of time seems relative, which means it is influenced by perspective. Waiting for the beach vacation to get here takes forever and on the plane ride home I wonder where the week went. And we all talk about how it seems to speed up when we age.
Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.
So since our time is precious, let’s try and remember to value it, and our friends and families and other people that travel our time with us.
Oh and say a prayer for Ukraine.
Best to you and yours,
Dan