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 19th 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...
