How we perceive and experience time is fundamental to our lives but we don’t fully understand what is a complex phenomenon. Sidney Perkowitz looks at how scientists and philosophers alike are seeking to grasp this mysterious and ever-present concept
“Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.”
Though the meaning behind this quote could be taken literally, it reads like a joke. Thought to be originally written by the science-fiction author Ray Cummings in 1919, the phrase was used by American theoretical physicist John Wheeler in his chapter of the 1990 book Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information.
But Wheeler, who had a way with words, also knew how to be serious about time, and in 1986 he wrote, “Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than ‘time’…To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence…is a task for the future.”
The shift in tone from treating time as a joke to something deeper is a sign that we do not understand it, though, like fish in the sea, we are immersed in it. Even while expressing our ignorance about time, Wheeler himself had no choice but to self-referentially allude to one of its mysterious aspects – the future. And though he could not explain time, he reminded us that it has human as well as physical meaning when he wrote in that same chapter from 1990: “Heaven did not hand down the word ‘time’. Man invented it…or as Einstein put it, ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.’ ”
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