The Topology of Time

TIME:

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“The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole”

Time virtually governs all our lives…but rarely does one ponder on this matter.

How the act of measuring time has evolved?

For a good part of our history, most people didn’t have regular and easy access to any kind of time measuring device, other than to glance at the sky on a sunny day to check where the sun was. For them, time as we understand it today did not really exist.

Starting from the ancient time (around 1500 B.C) the measurement of time was based on sundials, later on, methods that were independent of the sun appeared (e.g. sandglasses, waterclocks, and candles) but their accuracy was never great.

Around 1400 in Europe, the concept of time was tightly coupled to the concept of canonical (hours that mark the divisions of the day in terms of fixed times of prayer at regular intervals), and one of the best-selling books of Medieval time was The Book of Hours.

Fast-forwarding through time, we learn to take advantage of a physical phenomenon called

oscillation(more precisely the period of oscillation). Early oscillating mechanisms were the escapements, one of the first being Verge escapement.

In the present I would say we’re in a good position in terms of accuracy of measuring the time, even more, we’re leveraging the act of measurement and we can live by the second, using things like stopwatches, and to-do lists, and planning apps.

Is time an emergent property?

Why is it that we can move through space in every direction, but through time in only one? No matter what we do the past is always behind us. From an oversimplified point of view, the arrow of time is enforced by the second law of thermodynamics, in which the entropy of a system increases as it changes to a more disorderly state.

…the second law represents the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. The world is running out of time? Yes, and we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of usable energy is to say the world is running out of time then.

How does time unfold?

One might say that time is “constructed” by our clocks (or other time measuring devices) because time is what the clock tells us, but actually (around 1905) when Albert Einstein asserted that the speed of light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity, and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it. (A Brief History of Time)

Our general intuition tells us that there’s no connection between space and time, but actually, time bears more resemblance to a river, flowing and receding depending on the effects of gravity thus the concept of space-time was born.

A second on Earth is not the same length of time everywhere in the universe, because time would speed up and slow down differently around cosmological bodies with different masses and velocities.

Closing thought

While it is possible to look back in time, in reality, the act of looking back in time is just a biased cognitive process. “The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present” - John Archibald Wheeler

So an awareness of the present time is substantial for doing but inadequate for being.