Do You Know What Time It Is?

[NB: This has been moved from my old site]

Its 31 May (2012) and I’m almost out of time for my May post.


Its therefore timely to talk about the 2008 BBC Horizon documentary “Do You Know What Time It Is” that has been aired locally recently, presented by particle physicist Brian Cox. While I accept Cox tries to make a difficult topic intelligible, his treatment of Time goes too much into the world of science fantasy.
Cox talks about Time in the quantum physical world, which is all very well, but the point I let go is when he talks about “bending” space and time, a popular theme in quantum mechanics, relativity and gravitational effects on light, but which is taken too literally.

For me, Time is really an artefact of human memory. Time doesn’t exist in the physical world. Its a metaphysical concept  first invented by primitive man to understand movement, fundamentally the regular (apparent) movement of sun and moon around the earth, seasons, tides, and human ageing. We have evolved Time as a scientific concept to describe something that really only exists in our minds. Because we have memory of “past” we use our mind to project predictions into the “future”. We use these flawed facets of the Time dimension to understand motion, and it works well to a point. But Time fails us in the relativistic/quantum world. So we try to redefine it without first understanding what we actually mean by Time.

Dont get me wrong, I’m not saying conventional Time is a waste of time. However, another approach to Time is the Australian Aborigines understanding in the context of the “ever present now”. There is no past, no future, just “now”. This is their “Dreamtime” model of Time. In Western Philosophy its known as “Presentism”. This idea also exists in computing. Conventional “Real Time” computing is inadequate for some engineering applications, so a time agnostic approach has evolved called “Data Flow”.

In this paradigm, processes are not activated in a chronological sequence, but only when predefined prerequisite conditions are met.

These two different models of Time (or execution sequencing) are in some ways analogous to the rectangular (x,y,z) versus spherical (a,r,r) co-ordinate models of 3D space. The are just different models of the same reality.

All this reminds me of a scene out of The Matrix. To paraphrase: Then you’ll see, that it is not space time that bends, it is only yourself.