What Exactly is Time?

Posted on September 24, 2008
Filed Under Chief Blogging Officer

I have often wondered about the essence of time, and I have heard it defined as a number of different things when considered from different perspectives. Of course the most common phrase that comes to mind is “time is money,” but, with due deference to my financial minded friends, an economic system is a man made construct that could be changed in an instant if enough people agreed. If time is money, is “Euro time” more valuable than that of the United States? Is African time worth far less than Japanese time?

It is true that in our society, which is, after all, in its own right just a man made construct (and I do mean “man made” because unfortunately, women have had little say) we spend a lot of our time in the pursuit of money. We use the money to buy things like food, clothing and shelter. We used to spend our days obtaining food, maintaining and building shelter, and making our own clothes rather than spending our time making money and buying these things. We also used to make our own art, and our own music, both individually and communally, and everyone participated. Now we buy that stuff. Do we buy it with time?

We trade our time, our lives, in fact, for currency, and the value of that currency is diminishing almost daily. Then you have to consider that many of the things that we buy with our time are bought “on time,” meaning we pay for these things, like our cars and homes and even our clothes and computers and televisions and washers and dryers, on credit. We pay interest that accrues over time, meaning we always pay much more for these things than they are worth. So, if you pay a $1500 mortgage, and you make $4500 a month, you give away a third of your time but you own practically nothing in the first years of your mortgage. By the time you pay interest on your credit cards and your vehicles (which depreciate daily), your time becomes practically worthless.

I think that the way that the earth spins and revolves around the sun is the closest thing we have to an accurate barometer of time, coupled with our position as a planet relevant to other celestial bodies that pass through space on cyclical paths. But you have to remember the precession of the equinoxes when you consider this, because the earth wobbles on its axis. The precession takes about 25,765 years, a period of “time” that is referred to as a Great Year, or Platonic Year. During any one of these earthly cycles of time, many different economic systems and forms of money have come and gone.

So I think that to actually answer the question, what is time, you have to know where the earth is in terms of the various cycles that we are embedded in. The ancient Mayans, Egyptians, and others seemed to have done this, and there is much that we can learn from them, though many of their sacred texts have been destroyed, perhaps because somebody wanted us to come to believe that time is in fact money.

I have heard it said that time is art. I like that philosophy, because back in the day, when we made our own clothes and homes and utensils, musical instruments, etc., all of our time was externalized as an expression of personal and cultural creativity. I don’t know that this is what time is, but it is interesting to consider.

Time is thought of at present as being linear, but I have heard suggestions that time is in fact radial. Space-time may have six dimensions.

I guess I will keep pondering the nature of time, and as more people join in, I think that we will all experience time in a different way. There is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Will this new understanding make time travel possible? Here’s what Michio Kaku says about it: