Was listening to Frank Sinatra's rendition of "As time goes by" in the car this morning while I was dropping Nadia at school. The melody is so soothing and the lyrics penetrated my mind on this cold "Nuwara Eliya" style morning in Riyadh.
Time, the pundits say, is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of duration of events and the intervals between them. Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business,industry, sports, the sciences, music, dance, and the live theater all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. Some simple, relatively uncontroversial definitions of time include "time is what clocks measure" and "time is what keeps everything from happening all at once".
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe — a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.
Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity — so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. The operational "clock" definition of time leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured.
Furthermore, it may be that there is a subjective component to time, but whether or not time itself is "felt", as a sensation or an experience, has never been settled.
Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans. The economists and financial institutions use time as the basis of bringing in revenue.
How often have you sat in a waiting hall,looked at your watch, and observed the passage of time, sometime taking ages and sometimes moving at break neck speed? How do we account for this from our own mental perspective. In reality the timepiece is perfectly stable and uniform and the lapsed time is still the same although the perception to the human mind may be different.
It must have a dependency to whatever else goes on within the thinking process in order to provide us with this long and short perspective we experience, day in and day out.
We also hear that "Time waits for no one". Now why would Time want to wait for anyone in the first place? What does time care about us waiting, hurrying, cursing, or smiling? Baffles me!
Yet, we all still think and believe that Time is the driving force into which we are born, live our lives, do our dirty, Abbots and all, and eventually leave this earth.
Imagine if Time were to stop? What would that require? The earth to stop rotating, revolving and the rest of the planets to halt? Would that be the Armageddon everyone was expecting on Dec 21, according to Mayan predictions which never came to pass?
Funnily, I stopped wearing a watch since I got myself a mobile phone some years ago. Why? Well I can tell time on the mobile. Why would I need a Rolex? Yet, I still see many men and women wearing watches in addition to carrying two or three mobile phones. Baffles me even further.
Have a great Sunday!
Amen!
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