It’s only a matter of time
Is time a reality? Why is it that a watched pot never boils or that time passes more quickly when you’re having fun?
I keep running out of time. Perhaps because the objectives I set don’t have realistic time scales: I try to accomplish too many things within too short a time. This leads me to think that time is not a reality but a concept or a measure.
As Woody Allen once said, “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” Time is what separates cause and effect. (*)
Our concept of time varies. Sometimes it seems to drag and at others it seems to fly. Time it would seem also appears to pass more quickly as one gets older. Stephen Hawking suggests that the perception of time is a ratio: Unit of Time : Time Lived. For example, one hour to a six-month-old baby would be approximately "1:4032", while one hour to a 40-year-old would be "1:349,440". Therefore an hour appears much longer to a young child than to an adult, even though the measure of time is the same. (*)
Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. (*)
Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. 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, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable. (*)
All I know is that day follows night and the seasons come and go. No sooner have we celebrated New Year than we seem to be counting the shopping days to Christmas!
(*) Information gleaned from Wikipedia.
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