Wibble Wobble
There’s perhaps an immediate assumption that I would write about time because it’s New Year’s Day. I have done the thing and I am hyper-focused on the concept of time because we’ve all just passed a grand reminder of its unrelenting march through eternity.
Sure, sort of.
Like a few of my peers, I actively think about time a lot. I do it in a few very human (albeit neurotic) ways, and I also muse on it philosophically a bunch. I have a childlike fascination with time because it’s rather frequently “in the way.” Not like an obstacle — more like the sky. It’s incredibly difficult for me to think about many things without some consideration to their relationship with time. Cutting to the quick of it, I’m not writing about time now because I’m thinking about it now. I’m hopeful that by writing about time now, I can strike while the iron is hot — while you are thinking about time, dear reader. Because politely, I can fuck off and play with time whenever (and I do quite often). But for many others in my experience, time is subconscious and in many cases a subject to be avoided. For me that’s a bit silly; I already stated that time is always “in the way,” and so avoidance feels mostly like denial. Regardless, we all have some relationship with time, and I feel like there’s something beautiful worth digging toward in words.
I hear more and more that “time does not exist.” In my understanding, this is a sort of half-truth in a few ways. We tend to conceptualize time the same way we conceptualize space and the matter that fills it. Matter is made of particles though, and from our current understanding time may or may not be at all. The idea of time particles remains a theoretical one, with chronons and tachyons being currently unobserved (I’d be delighted to be concretely wrong here, but terse research turns up nothing to the counter). In this way, time isn’t real the way that matter is; it’s purely conceptual. That begs the question(s), “well what the fuck is time then and why are we bothering with it at all?”
Great question(s).
The time we are most frequently bothered with is linear time, and we bother ourselves with it because it stands as one of the few tacit agreements to which the wide majority of humans willingly subject themselves. Put less pedantically, the time we care about is a linguistic construct that allows us to function as a group more efficiently. It’s easier to relay details concerning the passage of “time” if we have standards. All the same, much like every other linguistic construct the “time” that we know most readily was at some point made up and spread like an infection. Further proof of that rests in that at a few points in history, some fuckwads have taken it upon themselves to disagree and use their own method of keeping time. To date, those have been primarily drowned out. Humanity collectively “decided” that it was in our best interest to have “time” be just one thing. This has not been a small effort. A few pieces stand out as hallmark of the co-evolution of humanity and “time” through time.
- There are notable differences in the physical world associated with the passage of time. Ancient civilizations marked day/night cycles, larger lunar cycles, seasons, and eventually years. The Babylonians had a pretty good estimate for a year at 360 days which gave rise to their numeral system which is partially why you learned that a circle has 360˚ inside of it. (neat)
- Turns out sixty is a great number because it’s so easily divided and past the invention of fractions, it became increasingly useful to communicate in fractional time. You could meet people at the quarter day, or the third day, or the half day. As civilization grew more nuance, we needed time to be more nuanced. So sixty stuck around.
- The Egyptians used another fan-favorite numeral for dividing their longer days into shorter segments. While day and night were obviously separate, clarity was added to further divide those into smaller pieces. Night was given twelve hours based on the movement of stars (and the nuance here relates back to clusters and sixty) and daylight was given ten hours, because ten is very easy for human communication (given our usual ten carpal digits). The remaining two hours in a day came from dusk and dawn, which padded daylight on either end and served the importance of cleanly cleaving day and night.
- This system served us very well for a very long time. Roughly 360 days in a year (a number which became increasingly more exact), 24 hours in a day, and divisions of 60 down from there given the “niceness” of 60. That was all well and good until science advanced to a point where we needed ever more strict standards for increasingly precise and increasingly small measurements. This meant retrofitting our standard of time (the second) onto something natural. Connecting an artificial construct to a completely organic phenomenon is no small feat — it requires that scientist find an event precise enough to serve as the standard of comparison for all other events in the human universe. The atomic clock is the result of all of these efforts, and is most currently based on atomic vibrations of a Cesium atom. Good job, science; you did it.
In short, we bother with “time” because it helps us work together more efficiently. Humans survive as a group and so we need some basis for communication. An earlier model of myself was fascinated by this principle because in a way, “time” is the ancient language spoken at the Tower of Babel. It’s not lost, it’s just severely under-appreciated.
So then, what makes the “time does not exist” a half-truth? Well, we agree that “time” exists, and so it does. There are a lot of chunks of reality that are simply agreements. It doesn’t make them less real, it just makes them less material. Does “time” have a material component? Yes, absolutely but generally speaking you’re probably not going to love the answer.
“Time” is a convenient and linear system for relating the human experience to the entropic progression of the universe and all parties within it. Entropy is a measure of (dis)ordered potential of the universe, and the way we casually relate the two is put forth in the second law of thermodynamics.
The entropy of the universe is always increasing.
In a very human way, this relates to the idea that everything ends. Today will end, your favorite TV show will end (even One Piece), and though it may be upsetting, you will also end. There is an inherent seed of dissonance in this casual relationship between “time” and entropy. We perceive “time” as a linear progression that is rigid and metronomic. It beats on. The thing is, we know that even “time” is not quite linear, it’s just very very very closely linear here on Earth near such a large source of gravity (the Earth). The classic experiment involves starting two timers, one at the bottom of the sea and the other at the top of Mount Everest. After some time (not infinity but not an hour) they will show distinctly different measurements of time despite having both been initiated at the same moment in “time.” Cool, time and “time” are both a bit wibbly wobbly.
Where it gets weirder still is in the highly complex confluence of the unconscious biological and highly conscious (or at least partially conscious) psychological realms. A very human experience is one in which the hour, or the day, the week, the month, or the year drags on or flies by. This is so human we have at least one idiom for it. This didn’t really hit me until it got surreptitiously spelled out for me in college. A professor was having us model atomic interactions and for programmatic efficiency he suggested we short cut the simulation by ignoring linear time in favor of an “event-based model.”
That meant ignoring all “time” in which something of interest wasn’t happening.
This willful ignorance of “dead time” does make the program run more efficiently. Given our bodies are electric meat suits constantly trying to cheat entropy, it makes sense that we might subconsciously do something similar. And we do, sort of.
Time — actual time or really entropy— for humans boils down to the shortening of our telomeres and the loss of our cells’ ability to proliferate ad infinitum. We don’t die when some timer hits zero, but rather because the motors that make us go literally grind themselves into oblivion. If this happened entirely linearly, everyone would live to the same age (barring accidents, murder, and mild statistical deviance). Flatly, it doesn’t and we’re well aware of that. Other factors come into play that wildly change the entropic gains our body goes through. Wanton substance use, persistent or acute physical or psychologial trauma, dietary mishaps all tend to expedite the process of our telomeres shortening. This is why we might see someone in their late 20s who has spent much of their youth smoking or sun-bathing look much older. It’s also why we might see someone who has been through a really difficult year come out looking more than a year’s worth of time older. Human age is based in linear “time” but our entropy, and truly our progression toward death is non-linear and largely much less forgiving.
I joked a lot in 2020 about how this year was long enough that I’d be turning 40 in 2021. It’s a joke, it isn’t very funny, and it is only colloquially untrue. When I talk about being a modern Methuselah, or when I ask people to guess my age and don’t deny the numbers far above the “truth,” it’s because I know that my “age” and my age don’t align. That I am older in my life than I am in my years.
This is where I want to end and prompt you, dear reader, with a reflection. 2020 was rough. It was a series of acute trauma, several of which continues to persist. Our relationship with “time” and age was not particularly healthy before, largely in part because we are very uncomfortable with endings.
This is a bittersweet opportunity to consider how old you might be, and why your peers of the same years might feel wizened or immature in comparison. It’s yet another lens to consider our privilege, our trauma, and our chosen purpose with the time/entropy we do have.
It may also be the slap we need to begin to align our desires with our actions more in the “new year”.
Join me next “time” when I talk about something else.
Sincerely Not Late,
August
