Shadows of Time

Time is a really big four-letter word.  We talk about it, write about it, measure it, but really no one quite knows what it is.  Consider by analogy the fish living in water.  Does it know or recognize the water.  For the fish, water is almost unrecognized and surely unknown. Like time is for us.

It is not known whether time has a direction.  This means we don’t know if time is reversible.  Most think time does have the proverbial arrow – no reversal.  Physicists are especially interested in time, and what it means. Railroads live by it.  Airlines mostly ignore it. Doctors never heard of it.

Sometimes what a thing means is reflected in how we use it or modify it, as with an adjective. For time, there is a long list of at least fifty modifiers.  Here are some of them. They betray both our confusion and our understanding of time.  Look at all our needs for this basic quantity/concept in our lives.

ample	first	long	olden	short
appointed	full	longer	part	shorter
considerable	future	longest	past	shortest
difficult	hard	lose	precious	spare
down	hold	lost	present	spend
due	idle	make	proper	sufficient
elapsed	last	mean	reasonable	third
enough	later	more	regulate	tough
equal	lead	much	same	valuable
extra	less	next	second	waste

Don’t forget “schedule” and “wrong.” There are more...

Now to measure time, we need a lot of descriptors, from nanoseconds to millennia, eons, and epochs. Did you know that scientists don’t know what happens to time when the length you measure is less than 10^(-42) seconds. That would be a micro-micro-micro-micro-micro-micro-micro second.  So, time may be quantum in its nature. No one knows.

In sum, we haven’t defined time per se, we’ve merely looked at its shadows on the wall. Don’t you think it’s “high” time to “take” time to “spend” time to learn more “about” time?

After all, you live in it, or do you swim in it?