The Winged Chariot of Time

The Elusive Nature of Time

Throughout all of Man’s experience, through every aspect of the world and universe he inhabits, runs the elusive entity called Time. The clock, deputy for the sun and stars, tells him when it is time to get up, time to go to school or work, time to eat, and time to retire.

Time governs not merely man’s activities but his very being. Like every living organism, he exists by grace of thousands of intricately synchronized rhythms. His pulse keeps time, tranquilly or otherwise; the electrical rhythms of his brain time their rhythms to sleep or wakefulness.

Other living creatures, far more than man, are governed by “biological time” that links interior processes to the regular rhythms of the outside world. The morning glory opens by the clock; the maple leaf grows green or flames scarlet by the calendar; the mallard flies north or south — taking its direction from some instinctive internal calculus involving time and the sun.

Time, which gives a continuity and pattern to life, also brings about destruction and death. The morning glory, splendid in the dawn, is wilted at noon; man, maple and mallard all live their allotted life span. There is nothing under the sun, or over it, of which we cannot say: “this, too — in time — will pass away.”

Of all the great abstractions of science, it is omnipresent time — not space or force or matter — that comes most often to our lips. Time is a great teacher, a great healer, a great legalizer, and leveler; it stands still, slips away from us or flies past us. We can save time or lose it, spend time or waste it (time is money!).

“Two of the most powerful warriors are patience and time” — Leo Tolstoy

What we cannot do, oddly enough, is define it. To the psychologist, time is an aspect of consciousness, the means by which we give order to our experiences. To the physicist, time is one of the three fundamental quantities — the other two are mass and distance — in terms of which he can describe anything in the universe. To the philosopher, the definition of time has several variations. Yet these learned men, though they may write books about time, cannot define time in a satisfactory way to one another, or even to themselves.

The puzzle and paradox of indefinable time was summed up 1500 years ago by Aurelius Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, philosopher and later saint. “What then is time?” he asked. “If someone asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know not.” Fifteen centuries have not sufficed to solve St. Augustine’s problem.

Thinking and discussing about this indefinable entity is made no easier by the fact that the word “time,” scientifically speaking, refers to two different, though related, things. The first is interval, which means duration in time. The second is epoch, which means location in time. If one asks, “How long will the concert last?” one is asking about interval. If one asks, “What time will the concert begin?” the subject is epoch. The different between the two is often important but not always apparent.