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Concept of Time

C

Christy

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
I'm just wondering if anyone else has troubles with the concept of time?

When I was a kid, I referred to everything as yesterday regardless of if it did happen yesterday, today or if I was planning to do it tomorrow. I was diagnosed with spatial dyslexia and given a special watch to help me learn to read a clock.

Right through adulthood I've found my concept of time seems to be different to other people.

This has come to the forefront again because of my need to deal with timezones. I find them highly confusing. I've come to the conclusion that I am not the one that's wrong (ha), it is every other person that thinks we are standing still and time is passing us by. I'm sorry, but that is not the case. It is us who is moving through time, but Australia is ahead of most of the rest of the world ;)

The way I visualise it is time is a ruler and a map of the world with the circumfrance broken along the International Date Line is moving along the ruler. We're technically not going in circles.

If I were to make a clock, I would put a slowly rotating globe of the world inside a stationary perspex globe that has the longitude lines marked with the hours. Perhaps a little impractical, but a truer representation of reality!

Am I crazy? Does any one else think this way?
 
You're not crazy. You're a creative thinker who has found fault with something you see as an imperfect measurement---and you're right! We don't go in circles. Planetary orbits are ellipses. :nerd:
 
Kinda, but not quite what I meant.

If you take a pen and start drawing in a circle, but move the page as your drawing, you'll get a spiral. The earth is spinning in a cirlce/ellipse, but as it spins is moving forward in time. So technically it's not a circle/ellipse.
 
True. Sometimes I forget parts of scientific stuff and then wonder why there's a hole in my argument/statement. Brain, work with me here, will ya?
 
Judge said:
If you want crazy, then think of time like I do. Something as elastic as a rubber band. Not linear at all. ;)
Click to expand...

I wasn't going to delve that deep. That's just taking it too far Judge...

JK, I agree, the markers on the ruler aren't spaced evenly, just to confuse you all ;) You can't measure that with a clock though.
 
Oh I had problem with time. At times, time just seems to be a background noise when I am concentrating on stuff. Other times, I am very obsessed if I need to get something done at a certain time. I can be obsessively looking at my phone for the time.

As for reading time, it has be digital. I dislike analog because I have to read out the minutes by multiplying the number by 5.

For time as a concept: I think is just a mental concept. In actuality, our brains construct time by the way objects and/or environment changes. For instance, we know that the sun rises or sets by the waxing or waining of light. It is a change so we make a note of it.

My three feelings about the concept of time. :)
 
The International Date Line as a thing I always wondered about when I was a kid. What would happen if you were to cross it? Do you lapse back in time for what? 24 hours? I can understand timezones, but the fact that there's a hard line on the globe seems weird.

As for my own experiences with "time". I have no clocks in my room. If I look at time, I can easily get stuck and obsessed with doing things for X amount of minutes and just am really aware how time is ticking. It would help me put a better tag on what I'm doing though. For instance; if I think back about my day I have a list of things, if time is involved I seem to label them with timestamps as well. "At 11:15 I woke up, at 11:23 I made breakfast, at 11:30 I showered, at 11:45 I got dressed..." and that's how I tend to turn it into an activity log. And I really think I should put my attention to other things.

However, for some weird reason I can do pretty close guesstimates of time. I'm rarely more than 5 minutes off from the actual time... and that's even in a dark room where I have no sense of time of day (thus not through the position of the sun or outside noises). I can wake up half groggy in the morning and most of the time tell myself (for example) "it's 9:05 is, isn't it?" I grab my phone to check the time (which, I removed from my stand-by screen; just for the sake of paying attention to time).

I also have a decent guesstimate of how long it takes me to get somewhere, thus I rarely show up late or way to early. Like Gandalf; I arrive when I mean to. Granted, I do get a bit jittery at times when I actually have to keep track of time. I'm spending more time looking at the seconds pass than actually doing stuff. But then again, I guess that's what people call "Waiting". Considering I travel by public transport a lot and don't want to sit at the train station for 20 minutes, I rather spend that time at home. That's however where the waiting game starts. Plan around small things I can do, and NOT lose track of time.

I think the notion of timezones is silly. Why is that we have to create timezones so that everyone's morning is around 7 am? What's wrong with it being 9 pm? It doesn't change a thing to it being dawn, dusk, afternoon or night. But I guess the am/pm system would have to go. Since that's confusing to some people I think. What's wrong with just going from 0:00 to 23:59? Well, continental Europe does it for most part I believe.
 
Historianthomas said:
For time as a concept: I think is just a mental concept. In actuality, our brains construct time by the way objects and/or environment changes. For instance, we know that the sun rises or sets by the waxing or waining of light. It is a change so we make a note of it.
Click to expand...

Yes--I concur with this perspective.

The actual "number" time? Technology forced the system. We have standard times zone because railroad engineer Sir Sanford Fleming needed to figure out how to keep train schedules coordinated on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Each town would set its own time by the sun, and if they couldn't coordinate time between cities across the country, **** would get messed up. I read in Einstein's biography (the recent one that was popular) how the Swiss perfected inter-city clock coordination in the late nineteenth century and used it to run accurate trains.

We also have the telegraph to thank for encouraging standardized time--that was the first communications medium to effectively separate the communication of the message from physically transporting the message through space, the wire moved it so fast. That enabled coordination of time across great distances.

It's stuff like that that makes time seem "unreal", I'd say--the scope of our experience widened beyond our immediate surroundings way back when.

But building on Historianthomas's point--yes, time only "exists" in our minds. Inasmuch as -- the only moment that ever actually "exists" is the here and now. You can remember stuff that happened, you can think about stuff that will happen, but if you "forecast" in either direction, it's only ever a guess, and the farther forward or backward in time the guessed event occurs/occurred, the less accurate your picture of it will be. Even if you remember it vividly.

That's why weather forecasts aren't accurate the farther out they prognosticate, and why there is such a profession as historians.
 
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