BLOG 11: CHRONOCULTURE – 1: TIME AND THE ANCIENTS

SUMMARY: Chrono-culture can be defined as the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices towards time. This is a sense in which it doesn’t seem to have been widely used – if indeed atall? -hitherto.

Though ancient societies displayed various forms of chronoculture, these were usually very different from our modern western attitudes. Temporal ignorance in various versions was a common theme throughout. Nor can we reasonably expect that we have reached a final true version nowadays: our descendants will more likely develop chronocultural attitudes very different to our own....

DEFINITIONS CLARIFIED

That the term ‘culture’ can be notoriously difficult to define is a fact well known to sociologists. In fact at least 30 different definitions have been proposed. Most of these however merely refine or elaborate on the central idea I will adopt here. So, for any particular aspect of experience, I take ‘culture’ to be ‘the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices’.

Further my term ‘chronoculture’ seems to have been used only in limited terms of anthropology or archaeology so far. It’s been applied when researchers seek to assign the relics of some ancient civilisation to their proper date in history. So that for examplepre-historians speak of the chronocultural sequencing of Stone Age artefacts from Britanny.

Here however I will employ the term ‘chronoculture’ in a much wider sense – as ‘ the sum of any society’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerned with time.’

ANCIENT THOUGHT

One striking feature of modern temporal studies is the amount of effort devoted to ancient or primitive time thought. The sheer volume of such studies can be taken as reflecting a strong suspicion that there is something missing or even mistaken about the overall modern chronocultural viewpoint. Or in contrast there is little similar effort to establish what the ancients thought about sciences like chemistry or geology - since modern paradigms are wholly satisfactory in such spheres.

In any case we can hardly know very much about the chronoculture of far prehistory. What we can discern is almost entirely based on archaeology. But we do know that humans were making weapons and tools at least 1 million years ago. Whence it seems they must have had some realisation of a future wherein these constructs would be used.

However tool-making is not entirely a human capacity as anthropologists once believed. It’s now been repeatedly demonstrated that various other animals, and even birds, can demonstrate similar capacities. Though whether this means that they too must be conscious of a future is still anybody’s guess.

People in any case began to concern themselves with much more than the immediate future at least 60,000 years ago. So much is suggested by various Neanderthal graves, which are the first known burial sites. Frequently these contained weapons and utensils as if providing for a world beyond our own. As such these graves provide the first suggestions of belief in an after-life, which extends beyond the individual’s mortal term and has been a prime constituent of most religions until recent years.

And some of these early Neanderthal graves had floral decorations – which must make our modern custom of funeral flowers one of the most enduring chronocultural customs of all!

TIME MEASUREMENT

By 30,000 BC in any case some Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) peoples seem to have been recording the lunar cycle as 29 dots, so forming the first calendars in cave paintings or scratched into small bone. Such was the contention of Alexander Marshack (1918-2004), America’s leading Ice Age specialist who studied the motivation and belief systems behind cave art and Palaeolithic thought.

Otherwise our notions of prehistoric chronoculture are based on observing certain Stone Age societies - like the Australian Aboriginals or the Brazilian Amondawa - which have survived in cultural isolation into modern times. As might be expected such societies normally reckon days by the obvious lunar or monthly cycle, rather than the much longer annual or solar cycle which is harder to record. Subdivision of the day is usually reckoned in terms of mealtimes, and may be refined in terms of altering shadows from sunlight.

With little or no concept of large numbers beyond 3 or so, such peoples usually exhibit poor sense of dates, the exact age of an individual, or the greater sweep of history. So that they are little conscious of time as we know it, being wholly unaware of its higher refinements and possibilities.

And yet such has been the chronoculture of all humanity throughout 99% of its whole million years!

AGRICULTURE, TIME, RELIGION

But with the onset of agriculture and more settled societies in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, early societies required more time-conscious attitudes. Good plant cultivation requires a developed sense of seasonal timing, which can only be gleaned from close observation of the sky where gods were thought to rule.

Wherefore agriculture, astronomy, time measurement and religion have always been closely intertwined throughout most of history, indeed right up until the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.

This four-fold inter-relation (agriculture – astronomy – time – religion) is very obvious in the first major societies we know of, beginning in The Middle East and especially Ancient Egypt over 5,000 years ago. And because its agriculture depended so closely on the seasonal accident of the annual Nile floods, Egyptian society was the first to employ a yearly or solar calendar, indeed one from which our modern version still derives.

The Nile floods could be predicted by astronomer-priests who observed the night sky very accurately. Likewise the day could be subdivided by observing solar shadows measured either by length or by angle, as indeed various 20-metre obelisks surviving from that period still attest.

But these first astronomer-priests also interpreted their objective sky-watching in more subjective religious terms. This meant that, apart from the solar calendar, the chrono-culture of Ancient Egypt often differed radically from our own. For example over the first few thousand years – say from 5,000 to 2000 BC - they seem to have had no unified chronology or proper accounting of historical dates. Apparently history was considered to commence with the start of each new ruler’s reign.

Further, as their surviving Pyramids and numerous mummies (both human and animal) still tell us, Egyptian society was hugely focussed on the after-life or next world which would come after this one that we know. And that to a degree which seems very alien to us now.

ANCIENT CHINA

Large scale organisation of Chinese society apparently began about the same as in Ancient Egypt, that is around 3500 BC. But, according to scholars like the late GJ Whitrow, the great difference was that the Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples. So they devoted great effort to provide chronological continuity between different regimes in different parts of the country, with works like The Book of History extending over several thousand years.

And by 1500 BC astronomers of the Shang Dynasty had amassed very long records of the heavens to show that the year was 365.25 days long.

Chronoculturally however such impressive accuracy in ancient Chinese astronomy and history was still inextricably associated with astrology. So rulers paid high regard to oracles, with divination ceremonies intended to fathom a future regarded as at least partly knowable. To some extent such beliefs survive in the modern Chinese penchant for gambling, often involving procedures which western wisdom would now reject perhaps too automatically.

High achievement accompanied by low superstition in China was again evident when Mandarin Su Sung constructed his great astronomical clock in 1084 AD. This clock took the form of a house-sized waterwheel – which advanced intermittently by just one step or ‘tick’ once a bucket was weighed down sufficiently from a constant inflow.

This earliest of all mechanical clocks was also strongly correlated with astronomy through a sighting tube pointing at some selected star. And it was accurate to a few minutes in 24 hours - much better than the first weight-powered clocks which didn’t appear in Europe until two centuries afterwards.

And yet the whole purpose of this magnificent mechanism must now seem ridiculous to the modern scientific mind. Apparently it was built to ensure that star positions would be known even if the skies were cloudy, so that exact astrological charts could be drawn up whenever a new child was born to the Emperor’s family!

Which again just goes to illustrate that chronocultural lesson already evident from Egypt: advanced development in one temporal region need not imply a similar sophistication overall!

THE MAYANS

The same lesson applies to the Mayans, whose foremost Meso-American society peaked around 750 AD. Totally isolated from Europe and Asia, the Mayans were one of the most numerate societies of old, though their expertise was mainly arithmetical rather than more widely mathematical. They used a number system based on 20 where we just use 10, presumably because they counted with toes as well as fingers from the start.

The Mayan ‘Sacred Year’ of 13 x20 = 260 days only coincided with the real or ‘Vague Year’ of 365 days every 18,980 days. But the real length of the real or ‘Vague’ Year was determined by prolonged astronomical observations on the planet Venus, and so accurate to 1 day in 5,000 years. This was twice better than the Gregorian calendar we still use.

Further the Mayans kept a continuous ‘Long Count’ of all days since the current world was thought to have been created, a ‘great cycle’ which most scholars now calculate as starting on September 8, 3114 BC.

But, as in China, such great accuracy was again very much contaminated by astrology. So each of the Mayan time divisions was assigned to a particular god who would carry the burden on his back before handing it on to the next deity. And since they were measuring time through circular recurrences, the Mayans also shared in that common primitive mistake of regarding time itself as circular So they expected history to repeat itself, with outstanding events doomed to recur as the Great Year came around again.

Such concerns also led the Mayans to design elaborate stone Calendars carved out in circular form. And yet apparently nobody, in all of Ancient American society anywhere, ever thought to insert an axle through the centre of such circles and so invent the wheel!

From which again we may draw the prime chronocultural lesson so evident throughout ancient history: High sophistication in one temporal region does not necessarily imply similar competence overall.

Which of course is also a lesson quite possibly still applicable today.

BLOG 10: TIME AND LANGUAGE

SUMMARY: The language through which we describe temporalities is currently very much undeveloped  and confused.  Lacking clear definition and terminology, Its descent from Indo-European sources carries with it various potential  misdescriptions, along with untested assumptions which may or not be true.

 A first step towards true time science may therefore be to  identify, challenge and test out such uncertainties.  This could require ignoring all notions of time we’ve ever assimilated  through the connotations of language, and thence reconsidering the whole topic anew.... 

THE LESSON OF HISTORY

Imagine if you were a learned person in the Middle Ages trying to discuss scientific matters – such as the chemical properties and reactions of materials.   In that case your language must often have been lacking, confused, and indeed misleading, so further making for unproductive thoughts and activities.

For example gases and their sometimes explosive properties would have been associated with ghostly powers because of their invisibility, as indeed their etymology from the German word geist still shows. Neither had mediaeval chemists any clear words – and so no clear definitions - for phenomena like combustion, pressure, atoms, molecules. So they would have been quite unable to visualise such concepts, much less consider them usefully.  

But now such agreed term-concepts can serve us as a sort of ‘shorthand for thought’ – and so make their associated phenomena much easier to describe, comprehend, communicate, manipulate.

We can therefore expect, and indeed readily observe, something similar for time science at its present early stage.   For the words people use, for whatever temporal notions they may have, are still obviously very much ‘presumptive, untested, and confused’. 

Time language is still in the Middle Ages as far as term-concepts are concerned

TIME AS INSTANT

Confusion of this sort is therefore evident in those two recent presentations about time (from New Scientist and Scientific American) which I’ve just reviewed in Blog 9.  For neither even attempts to clarify an important fact already well known to  philosophers – that we use the word ‘time’ with at least 3 distinct meanings in our everyday affairs.

First then is the idea of time as an ’instant’ – the sense in which you look at the clock or maybe ask your neighbour “What time is it now?”   And when he truthfully answers something like “It is now 9.31 in the morning”, you might then reasonably ask him further “But what do you mean by it?”

Further clarification would then eventually reveal that ‘it’ just means the number of degrees a combined hour/minute hand would have notched up on a circular 24-hr. clock-face since midnight.  And the clock-face in turn is just a mechanical version of the equally circular sun-dial which told the extent of Earth’s daily revolution as evidenced by a static sun.

So that when you ask “What time is it now?” you are really querying how many degrees the Earth has revolved, in its 360-degree daily rotation around its axis, since the arbitrary midnight point.  Though ‘midnight’ of course is another temporal misnomer, hardly ever equating with the actual middle of any night anywhere!

A similar question of circular motion is also involved whenever you look up your calendar to query “What date is it today?”.   Here again you are really asking how many degrees of another, but much greater, 360-degree circle (or really oval) the earth has traversed since its artificial starting line of January 1.  

Though on this occasion of course the circle is not one of daily revolution, but rather the greater circumference Earth slowly traces out over 365.24 days in its annual voyage around the sun.

TIME AS DURATION

A fundamentally different usage of that common word ‘time’ occurs when we talk of non-present events.  For example we speak of World War One as having happened “a long time ago”.   Or conversely we may be awaiting the arrival of the 2.30 train which should enter the station “a short time ahead.”

The basic property of time expressed here is one of duration, or time as durable and lasting - and possibly spread out over many of those instants I’ve dealt with above. (Though here I’m ignoring the very debatable connotations of those various temporal descriptors – i.e. “long, short, ago, ahead” – which in any case we can consider further below.)

Time as duration can therefore be considered as the sum of its many instants – be these reckoned in terms of days, years, circular degrees or whatever other unit you may choose.  So that for example people speak of World War One as having happened either “a long time ago” or “many years ago” (i.e. many time units), both phrases conveying much the same idea.

However a really rigorous physicist or philosopher might choose to describe all those accumulated instants in terms of chronons – or maybe Plancktons? - those still theoretical basic “atoms of time” I’ve already considered in Blog 5.  

To rethink our common perceptions of duration in terms of these ultimate chronons might then be a fruitful line of enquiry - much as when England’s  John Dalton rethought chemistry in terms of ultimate atoms around 200 years ago ?

TIME AS ABSTRACTION.

Thirdly in any case there’s the meaning of time as an abstraction or idealised entity.  This is much as when we abstract the single concept of ‘velocity’, from all those numerous objects we see moving or changing at various rates in the world around. It’s also the sense in which people try to research time’s nature or properties, or indeed as when I’ve titled this blog as “The Future of Time” throughout.

To tease out and clarify some of its various properties may be one thing, but time as an abstraction can still prove excruciatingly difficult to define.  For example elementary physics may define time as distance divided by velocity.  But this is a circular definition because velocity is then distance divided by time! 

And the same holds true of Aristotle when he defined time as “the measure of motion in respect of before and after” – these two adverbs being again time-referent words!

Or as all who have pondered the subject will cheerily admit, it has proved almost impossible to provide an adequate definition of time so far. Which also helps to explain why, at this late date in scientific progress, we still have no proper ‘Science of Time’ at all......

OUR  INDO-EUROPEAN TEMPORALITIES

This may also relate to the fact that all western science has developed through languages evolved from the same ancient Indo-European source about 8,000 years ago.  The Indo-European language family apparently was – and remains - unusually rich in grammatical structures which convey fine distinctions between Future, Present, Past.

For example consider the temporal subtleties involved in the simple statement that “X could have been a great President”...

Greek, Latin, English, French, etc. (those languages of science all descended from the same Indo-European source) therefore all employ highly tensed forms of description, but ones  accepted with little or no consideration throughout history.   And their largely unthinking assimilation into modern usage still inclines people to consider time in various untested ways. 

Various other languages however make no clear distinction between Future, Present, Past.  Often they use just one verb form, accompanied by pointing forward, up or back respectively.  But whether these untensed languages should be regarded as less time-sophisticated - or alternatively more so - than our own is still unclear.

Most or all languages however do seem to share the common conflation between time and space implicit in our terms long and short – which can be applied to time or distance equally.    

A short time however can also be described as a brief one, which immediately highlights another kind of deficiency in our current terminology.  For there is no antonym (opposite descriptor) to describe non-brief, as indeed is true for various other temporal terms.

COMMON NOTIONS ARE OFTEN UNTESTED

There’s also the common idea that the future lies ahead of us all.  But, as first clarified in the 19^th century, this untested notion likely derives from the facts of human mobility: what will be encountered next lies at head of the crawling infant.  (While behind stretches back from its hind quarters likewise!)  

If however we humans had evolved as a completely immobile species, always  rooted to the one spot like a sentient tree or vegetable, it is doubtful if we might regard the future as lying ahead  of us at all!

Equally it’s seldom realised that ‘the past’ derives from ‘ passed’ events, which most people take to mean happenings which have now passed them by.   Such however may be a primitive or typically egocentric way of looking at things.  For alternately it might the people themselves who have passed by these events, as indeed Relativity Theory now seems to imply very forcefully.

To a certain extent too this untested notion of time’s passage may resemble the old erroneous notion of the passing sun.  For any mediaeval person nothing could have seemed more obvious: he or she had only to look up as the sun traversed the sky each day.  And so when Copernicus dared to propose the opposite – i.e. that is really we who pass by the static sun - the threat to human egocentricity immediately caused a huge outcry!

Something similar may now well be true of time......

Then again the distant passed is described as ‘long agone’ – or ago in  shortened modern form.  Ago is another temporal descriptor with no clear antonym.  But in any case it carries the unspoken implication that if the passed has gone it must have gone somewhere? – at which point again ensues large  confusion and perhaps mystery....  

Conversely there’s the notion of ‘the future’ whose simplest current definition is just “what will be”.  If so however the future can’t logically be changed!  Which kind of thinking would seem to forbid you to make a sensible jump sideways, if you suddenly found yourself in the path of a speeding car? 

From which one may infer that the common blanket notion of ‘the future’ is  sorely in need of clarification and perhaps redefinition into clearer term-concepts. for example ‘the personal future’, ‘the general future’, ‘the most likely future’, ‘the least likely future’ and so on.

All of which also helps to explain the dilemna of St.Augustine (ca. 400 AD),  now generally considered to be the premier psychologist of time.  Often he  confessed himself baffled by time’s many seeming contradictions, as for example when he queried: “How can it be that the future is not yet, the past not now, and the Present not always?”

Now we can see that Augustine was merely talking himself into needless knots tied up by the temporal limitations of Indo-European language – a conclusion which may well apply with equal force to much modern time thinking still.... 

Overall therefore the common language of time must obviously be employed with very great caution when deeper consideration is desired.  Instead, we may need to “sit down before reality like a little child” as Einstein advised and JL Synge suggested (Blog 1). This would require a recheck on those various assumptions which come inbuilt with the temporal language we have inherited from those primitive Indo-European sources, and thence perhaps commencing to reconsider time anew.

Possibly only then might a true and more productive science of time emerge...

BLOG 9: TWO RECENT REVIEWS

SUMMARY:

Within the last three months two recent issues of leading science magazines -  New Scientist (NS) and Scientific American (SA)  – support the main contention I have been advancing since starting these blogs over a year ago.

 For both these eminent magazines now also regard the problem of time and its real nature as one of the greatest possible scientific importance, one largely ignored by scientists so far, but now increasingly requiring to be resolved.

The treatment of time in both NS and SA also supports another contention I have advanced (Blog 1) – that our understanding of time at this stage resembles a jigsaw as yet unformed.   This is because they both discuss  various temporal facets presented by different specialist authors  – some 12 in NS and 20 in SA – but with no great connection or unity between them all.

Still their authors largely agree that some new outlook on time is now sorely required.  Or, in jigsaw terms,  we are probably still missing some new centrepiece of time understanding, one round which all those currently disunited temporal facets could be fitted readily.

In this blog I  will therefore review both of these new presentations, highlighting some of their main points relevant to new time understanding overall..... 

1 – New Scientist – October 8 2011

This issue is introduced by renowned Oxford quantum theorist David Deutsch, who suggests that “a conceptual breakthrough in one of (time’s puzzles) might solve them all”.   And he reiterates the growing consensus that “the notion of the flow of time is a nonsensical misconception despite being deeply imbedded in common sense.” 

In like vein other articles quote Einstein’s famous observation that “time is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion”, and Julian Barbour’s observation that “there’s remarkably little agreement on what time is: we can recognise time but do not understand it.”

Not even Einstein however really get to grips with the source of the supposed illusion: if time is not really “flowing past us”, then why do we all have such a strong impression that it does?

Relativity contradicts Quantum Theory

Others stress the basic and great disparity, between time as treated in quantum theory and relativity’s very different idea.  Broadly the former adheres to the old and outdated  Newtonian idea that Absolute Time pervades the Universe: if it’s midnight now in London, it must also be the same time everywhere else in the Universe.  Relativity however regards such thinking as nonsensical.  Rather it regards time as an elastic and variable construct, one entirely dependent on how you slice up the overall fabric of space-time.

This difference in temporal outlook between these two great pillars of modern physics – i.e. quantum theory and relativity - is therefore the source of their stubborn refusal to come together and be unified    But if such integration could ever be achieved through proper time understanding, then physicists might at last be in sight of  their long-sought T.O.E. (Theory of Everything).

The ’Arrows of Time’

Elsewhere NS  describes a scale of durations ranged from the shortest practical interval     (10^-18 secs)  to the age of the Universe (14 billion years)- a scale it presents in tabloid newspeak as “a journey through time” (sic).  But again in these blogs I have already dealt with such measurements in a more integrated and coherent  overview.  Cf Blog 4 (The Millimetre Scale) and Blog 5 (The Full Time Spectrum).   

The question of  “Time’s Arrow” or directionality is also discussed by  NS, though mainly in terms of  entropy.  This ignores the fact that about some half-dozen other such direction indicators have been identified elsewhere.   All of them seek to clarify how we might know whether time is “coming or going?” in conventional terms – but each of them also seems eminently arguable.  

The “Time’s Arrow” article also asks the crucial question - “Why is it that humans remember only the past?” (but not the future)  - a question often asked in similar terms  by others like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.

But this common phrasing for such a crucial question is very obviously a demonstrable oxymoron (lit. foolish statement).   It’s linguistically confused because ‘re’ implies ‘again or afterwards’, and so can’t possibly refer to future experience.

 Instead (as I have shown elsewhere in my two books on the paranormal) this crucial question is better phrased in terms of “why can we only re-call the past, but not pre-call the future?”  The problem is thereby established on a clearer basis, and the most logical answer is most surprising as I will later show.

Time Travel? 

NS also affords an almost obligatory article on time travel – a question of serious discussion over the last 30 years.  But in our daily lives we are already all time-travelling  in a myriad miniscule ways.  This is because all physical clocks (and presumably our own internal biochemical reactions) run at different rates dependent on motion and gravity.

More practical time travel into the future  - i.e. over significant periods like days or weeks instead of just nanoseconds - is however still only theoretical, while time travel into the past is more problematical by far.

Those well known psychological differences between ‘filled’time (full of interesting observations) and ‘unfilled’ time (episodes of relative boredom) are also considered in a more conventional way.  Whence follows the useful but confused conclusion that you can “stretch your lifetimes by trying to pack as many different and exhilarating experiences into it as possible.”  Here however one must note that it’s not your lifetime you can stretch (by even one second!) through such highly advisable lifestyles.  Instead it boils down to the common impression that filled years look longer in retrospect than unfilled ones...

Is Time a Cultural Construct?

But perhaps the most crucial suggestion in all these NS  articles comes from Swedish language psychologist Chris Sinha. He describes  chrono-cultural studies of the Brazilian Amondawa - a tribe cut off from the rest of humanity until 1986.  These people lived in a relatively timeless condition: their language was largely tenseless and with few or no time referents.  For example the Amondawa had no words for years, months, time - or even numbers beyond four.   

Societies like this who live close to Nature have also been the norm for over 90% of human cultural history. In a remark which therefore echoes famed child psychologist J. Piaget half-a-century ago, Sinha concludes that  “ our experience of time, it seems, owes as much to cultural invention as to the workings of the brain.”.....

So that to resolve the great time problem may require us to question all that we’ve ever learned or been taught about it, and thence commence to reconsider the whole experience anew.....

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2 – Scientific American – Special Edition - Spring 2012 

This special issue of SA (110 pages) covers much the same time territory as NS does, though more comprehensively.  Again it lends substance to my analogy of time’s current scientific status as a sort of unformed intellectual jigsaw, one with its various discernable fragments still scattered in large disarray.  So SA provides 17 headings for 19 different time articles, their content ranging from history through anthropology to cosmology and time travel.

The sequence of these articles is however completely disordered or entropic: there’s no attempt to group similar topics together so as to strive for greater conceptual unity.

For example the various scattered features on ‘relativity’, ‘twin paradox’, ‘time travel’, ‘astrophysics’, ‘entropy’ ‘cosmology’ (twice),’ could obviously be presented more fruitfully in closer relation under the single heading of ‘PHYSICS’.   Likewise other scattered features on ‘biology’, ‘neurology’, ‘chronology’ might usefully be summated under ‘PSYCHOLOGY’ – an absolutely crucial aspect for time understanding which is not awarded any heading at all!  

And finally ‘PHILOSOPHY’ – which can be defined as ‘the most general science’ – might best  have  been presented at the very end - in an effort to round up, summarise and integrate  those various other disciplines.   Or, again in terms of a metaphorical jigsaw, philosophy might provide those straight-edged pieces and corners which would bound it all.

SA  can also be faulted for largely ignoring the well-known intimate connection between our temporal language and the consequent time attitudes it must both induce and convey.  But such is a matter of prime importance because of the uniquely tensive content of the original Indo-European language system through which science has evolved.

Does Time Really ‘Pass’ or Flow?

Such criticisms aside however, SA provides excellent summaries of current time thinking by physicists, and also the latest advances of relativity into everyday affairs. 

For example renowned physics writer Paul Davies comes down firmly on the side of those many philosophers who maintain that our common impression that “time is passing” is probably an illusion: there’s nothing in physics to substantiate this universal everyday idea. The time of the physicist does not pass or flow - because it’s simplest to conclude that both Past and Future are fixed more or less equally.

 And in any case both Past and Future are just our little personal labels for that sector of space-time we humans encounter as we wend our daily lives through a frozen  Block Universe. In this version of reality, time is another version of space assumed to be a continuum, though perhaps quantised into chronons (time atoms) like the successive frames of a movie film.

Such a physical version of reality however very strongly contradicts our everyday observations, wherein our impression of passing time is probably the most basic experiential fact of all.  But yet it’s probably all an “illusion which cries out for explanation” – on which Davies wonders whether there may be a key quality to time not yet identified.   (A matter I will return to in a later blog....)

On the same topic contributor Craig Callender again notes that the notion of passing time is built into our language, culture, thought.   And yet this contradicts the fundamental laws of physics.  So a huge gap now exists between psychology and physics which requires to be bridged: likely it needs a new psycho-physical isomorph - a concept with the same shape for both disciplines - as JT Fraser suggested half-a-century ago.  (Again a matter I will revisit in due course)

Or is Time a Total Illusion?

Such physical concepts of time as revealed by Relativity are in total conflict with time as regarded in Quantum Theory, where older and more commonplace ideas hold.  However time seems to disappear totally when the Wheeler/deWitt equations unite electro-magnetism to relativity.  All of which is now forcing some physicists to conclude that the very idea of time is no more than a personally useful illusion. 

So perhaps it’s a bit like money - a useful personal contrivance which is still completely absent from the natural world?

Relativity Now Demonstrable on the Human Scale

SA also affords a very useful article on the history of timekeeping, and the ever-growing accuracy of clocks in recent years.  Essentially the latest aluminium-ion device should be able to measure the entire lifespan of the Universe to within an accuracy of 4 seconds, or 1 part in 10¹⁷ in more general terms. 

Though whether time really began with the Big Bang is now an issue of some uncertainty due to string theory – again a matter I’ve only accepted with due reservations in Blog 5.

More importantly in any case, other ion clocks have now grown so accurate that they can easily measure those very slight time distortions predicted by relativity for our everyday affairs.  For example they can show how time runs faster for any individual who is just one step higher than another due to his lesser gravity.  Likewise they can demonstrate time variation between two cars with a speed difference of just 20 miles an hour.  And of course there are those all those SATNAV devices which must use relativity mathematics to locate accurately wherever you may happen to be.

All of which means that Einstein’s Relativity Theory – formerly relevant to more exotic matters like atomic energy or distant starlight – can now be shown to apply equally in our everyday affairs.  We can therefore reasonably expect that its other implications - of past-future similarity and frozen spacetime – may well be equally demonstrable in some new type of experiment on everyday reality.

And if so there must follow a new scientific revolution in all our time thinking and attitudes, a revolution which will be truly Copernican in scope......