2. So Why No Proper Science As Yet?

THE FUTURE OF TIME

by Sean O'Donnell, Ph.D.

Few people doubt that our knowledge of time in the centuries to come, will be very different from what passes for temporal understanding nowadays.
To know where you may be going however, it helps to realise where you have been coming from!
In these articles I will therefore strive for systematic and simplified exploration, of all major sectors of time knowledge as currently known to science. I will not address relatively trivial matters such as more efficient time management. Instead I will seek greater comprehension, and hopefully consolidation, of time's larger mystery overall.
This project derives from “The Mystery of Time”, an AdultEd course conducted by me at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) – 1988 to 2,000 AD
2/ So Why No Proper Science As Yet?

SUMMARY
At least six reasons can be advanced to explain the current absence of any proper 'Science of Time' at this late date in science history. These range from the absence of accurate clocks in Ancient Greece, to the possibility that time as we know it may be just an illusion, a literal non-entity..

As I've already clarified, there is as yet no proper Science of Time at this late date in science history. And considered against the greater background of science progress overall, this is a very striking omission indeed.
For time is the single most dominant aspect of reality for us all. It's 'the great universal' which underlies all phenomena that we know. Yet strangely it's that single major facet of reality or experience about which science knows least.
This striking ignorance – about time's real nature as compared with our deep understanding of all nature otherwise – is therefore a matter which merits further examination of itself. As I will now proceed to do....
One of the few to have considered this neglect, or 'ignoring' of time by science over the last five centuries, was the late London mathematician and science historian J.G. Whitrow (1912-2000). In 1960 he published The Natural Philosophy of Time, an incomparable book which remains the most definitive work on time in its entirety. So through Whitrow's work and that of others, at least six reasons for this neglect of time by science so far, can now be clarified.
Of these I will take the most esoteric to begin...

AN ILLUSION TO HELP US MAKE SENSE OF REALITY?

Firstly therefore it may be simplest to think that there's no such entity as time at all. This was the thesis of Cambridge philosopher J.McTaggart (1866-1925) who published The Unreality of Time in 1908.
McTaggart clarified that the common experience of time seems to present two different aspects. There's our labelling of events as past-present-future, which naturally alters as our lives proceed (the A-series). But still the sequence of these same events as laid out in history can never change (the B-series).
For example Kennedy must always precede Obama in the historical sequence of American Presidents. This typifies the B-series quite obvious to us now in 2011, but likewise clear from any other point in history. But still from the viewpoint of the year 2,000 the Obama Presidency would be labelled future, whereas from 2020 it will be labelled past.
This may be a very important clarification of time's properties, and as such one to which I will return. But its inherent contradictions also led McTaggart to go one giant step further: he concluded that time itself is merely an illusion of our human minds. Is it just an anthropocentric notion we've made up to help us deal with our experience of reality?
Other philosophers from differing viewpoints have reached a similar conclusion. Of these one of the most extreme is contemporary English mathematician Julian Barbour. In The End of Time (1999), he reasons from quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity that the Universe is essentially timeless. If so, the current lack of any real Science of Time might be easy to explain: it would concern a topic which doesn't exist in reality, a literal non-entity.
Still Barbour and those who agree with him then totally fail to explain why time still forms such an major aspect of everyday experience. For no matter how compelling the logic from such deep studies, we all share a deep conviction that time exists (or should that be occurs?) - whatever it may turn out to be.
So that we can still reasonably aim to transform our widespread experience of time in its many guises into a more ordered body of knowledge, which is the defining characteristic of science everywhere.

TOO PROBLEMATIC FOR OUR MINDS?

Secondly perhaps there is no Science of Time because that simple four-letter word may convey many different shades of meaning as we attempt to describe reality. So that time as encountered in common experience, might (or again might not?) be very different from its more esoteric manifestations – for example in relativity, quantum physics, or at the birth of the Universe.
If so, attempting to gather all such manifestations under just one conceptual umbrella might be a project doomed to failure. This is another way of saying that an integrated new Science of Time might ultimately prove impossible.
But if such differences in what we mean by time really do exist, they certainly need to be teased out and clarified much better than so far. Or if a new Science of Time is ultimately to prove impossible, we need to know of clearer reasons why.

EVENTS ARE TOO TRANSIENT?

Thirdly and in any case, the transient nature of events may be another reason why time science has never flourished historically. Events are the prime source of our temporal comprehension, and time is an abstraction we derive therefrom.
For example if nothing at all ever happened to us – or even if things did but we never got to know about them through sleep or coma - we could hardly have any notion of time.
But events once happened can never really be experienced again. As such they exhibit a once-and-no-more quality in time. This makes them much less amenable to the scientific method, than objects which can endure indefinitely in space.
For example you might see two pheasants fighting in your garden at a certain time one morning in July. But then (barring cameras) you can hardly produce any evidence for scientific sceptics, who might reasonably doubt your timing and account of this rare event.
In contrast, and on that same morning in your garden, you might also decide to measure the length to which some prized giant vegetable has now grown. And to convince all those sceptics who might doubt your description, you can always invite them over to check on your measurements as they please!
Such rechecking by sceptics is of course an important aspect of scientific method-ology. It's a process which can always be easily applied to objects which exist in space, but not so much to events which occur in time. So that the historical development of time science may well have been neglected to this degree.
However the advance of technology since 1800 now enables us to largely circumvent this problem of event transience. Modern videos, cameras, sound recorders, etc. now enable us to 'capture' a semblance of events as they happen - and further manipulate their re-presentation by speed-up, slow-down etc.
All of which means that the unique transience of events is no longer such an obstacle to time science as it might have been two centuries ago.

NO CLOCKS IN EUCLID'S DAY

Fourthly, it may be relevant that there were no accurate clocks to measure time in Ancient Greece some 2500 years ago. This was the era from which modern science has sprung. Back then in contrast, rulers to measure space or small distances were always easy to fashion and standardise. Any convenient length of wood or metal would do.
So that when Euclid (300 BC) assembled the practical measurements of masons and surveyors into his new scientific logic of geometry, early science grew naturally more concerned with space (which was easy) than time (more difficult). This was a natural bias still prevalent, and is any case substantiated by other reasons as we will see.

WE GRASP SPACE RELATIONS FIRST

Fifthly our striking lack of time understanding so far, may well stem from what I'll term an accident of our infancy. For human babies display good competence in dealing with space relations from very early days. So much is shown by numerous studies on infant grasping, their early ability to recognise spatial patterns like familiar faces, etc.
Yet infants seem to display no similar time awareness for many months after they are born. Indeed their operational understanding of time may even have to wait on their assimilation of language with all its associated expressions of temporality.
That 'space precedes time' in the development of human cognition therefore seems true. More obviously also, and perhaps quite naturally, the later development of adult science has largely followed with the same priority.
For example Euclid laid out the primary laws of space with his new science of geometry about 300 BC. But as yet we have no developed system of laws or axioms to provide a similar science for time.
That NASA may then have arisen through an accidency of human infancy seems quite feasible. For it's easy to imagine another planet where infants arrive more cognisant of time than space. Out there adults may long ago have learned how to live forever – while still blissfully ignorant of cubes, triangles, satellites and space telescopes!
Finally this early priority, of space over time in human development, may well be the most important of those various factors, which can explain the absence of any true Science of Time so far. As such it's also a matter I'll consider further in my next article....