How to think about time
Thinking about time in our universe
Dr Elizabeth Mackintosh
Time can feel to us as both fleeting and endless, and the paradoxical nature of time continues to fascinate philosophers and scientists, and it is a theme that emerges throughout our CATALYST courses. Time and change being seen as just an appearance and an illusion has been something that philosophers and thinkers have grappled with since the Pre Socratics and this continues with our budding young ‘changemakers.’
Parmenides and Plato thought our understanding and perceptions of time are deceptive. For Aristotle time became associated with movements of bodies (sun, moon and planets). Time, said Aristotle, was ‘the most unknown of unknown thing.’ Aristotle also said that although time cannot be equated to change, it cannot exist without change.
Augustine developed two accounts of time. In one sense time is a creature of God and independent of human consciousness and how we perceive it. He also develops a psychological account of time. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that such a paradoxical thing as time could not really exist. Time is our own creation he claimed and that there is something in us and in the way our minds work that makes everything we experience through our senses be located in time.
In the mid to late 1700s we have the more common usage of visual ‘map of historical events’ – the timeline Cartographies of Time: A Visual History of the Timeline – The Marginalian. Western culture and therefore western language can increasingly be seen as linear-orientated and increasingly seen in terms of countable units, where one can waste and lose time and gain and save time. In Economics there is a sense of Time Economy, and it is a powerful force that influences ideas about urgency and scarcity, opportunity cost and time preference and interest.
The 18th century witnessed groundbreaking experiments that unveiled the existence of vacuums and the random motion of gases. These experiments also revealed planetary motion, marking a decisive break from Aristotelian physics. Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) introduced a novel perspective where space and time were conceived as independent of matter. In this framework, physical objects exist within space and time – entities considered eternal. God was then positioned as the creator of these objects within this pre-existing space and time, further implying the existence of an 'absolute' space and time within which God Himself resided. (BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Laws of Motion)
A mural depiction of Albert Einstein
In the 20th century, Albert Einstein offered a radically different understanding of time. His Special Theory of Relativity revealed that spacetime isn't a fixed, absolute backdrop of the universe. Instead, it's relative, changing based on an observer's motion. Furthermore, his General Theory of Relativity demonstrated that spacetime isn't separate from matter and energy; in fact, gravity itself is a curvature of spacetime caused by the presence of mass and energy, and even light follows these curves.
Having recently read a stunningly brilliant book by Philosopher Emily Herring on the life of Henri Bergson, Herald of A Restless World (Herald of a Restless World out now!!! - by Emily Herring), I became fascinated in Bergson’s understanding of time and his clash with Einstein. Bergson distinguished between time as we perceive it (real time) and the ‘time of science.’ What time feels like is an important part of understanding time and in fact Bergson preferred to talk about duration and he was interested in the everyday experience of time. The abstracted ideas of time as discrete units imposed onto reality was not how we, in fact, experience time. Bergson questioned the picture of reality offered by physics and this is an ongoing aspect to the work of philosophers (metaphysicists in particular).
Bergson felt he must defend other ways of knowing that weren’t the ways science knew things and in terms of what is allowed to matter. In a famous public debate between Einstein and Bergson, there was a sense Einstein had ‘won’ the debate and yet in terms of conceptions of time, what does really matter? Of course, they were both looking at time very differently in terms of how it can be ‘measured.’ For Einstein, time is like a clock in terms of ticks and units, whereas Bergson does not think time, and things more generally, can always be measured like that.
To return to the paradox of time. The paradox is that in terms of scale, our lifespan is insignificant and yet in this brief period of time when we are here in the world, this is the moment during which all meaningful questions, about time, arise. A philosophy of time is intimately connected to a philosophy of life, and I think it is crucially important to take our thinking about time seriously. It is also interesting in the current climate to think about how AI LLM’s and quantum computing would view or perceive time? Unit like? Fragmented? Or an opportunity of new possibilities in terms of what is offered by quantum computing?
How should we think about time?
How we conceive of time, being aware of alternatives to that conception, how we then come to measure it and why this all matters remain crucial questions.
As well as my own ponderings on time, below we have some insights from our alumni and fellow educators and facilitators at Team CATALYST:
Dr John Cullerne (Surmaster at Winchester College and a Lead Facilitator at CATALYST):
‘Recently in Faith Circles at Winchester College (The Nature of Truth?) the students have been thinking about time and reality drawing on ancient wisdom found, for example, in the Upanishads. An important theme found in the text relates to the concept of time and how it is intricately linked always to our existence and to living. Some Trantites (link: House from Home: Bramston's (Trant's)) and I explored how mathematics, biology, and spirituality all converge to reveal a structure of sacred geometry in the underlying reality and here we find connection. Connection is not static but a process and a living process, changing moment by moment. Through every connection the universe remembers itself anew.’
Dr John Cullerne
Philip, (Alumni August 2024 cohort): Time is the most valuable thing one has, yet it's underappreciated. We only have so many years - what is the point? We shouldn't let our hesitation or laziness hold back new memories, but enjoy activities.
Meriem, Tunis (Alumni August 2024 cohort):
‘I love the saying, hard times make tough men, tough men makes easy times and easy times make weak men. I think about this a lot. But, if you were to ask me to think about this on a deeper level, I would say that time is an enemy. An enemy that is certainly comforting. It makes you believe that it is abundant, even unlimited, before reality hits you and you realise that it has deceived you! You must exploit the roots of time!’
What do you think?
