@casualconversation l’ve always known that time is an artificial construct ever since I was told to sit down to study. As l grew up, l saw mechanical clocks getting replaced by battery clocks. Until l realised that the clock is actually being run from a centralised node, no matter where you’re located.
What l’m realising now is that, the calendar too is being constructed from a centralised network, whether it’s the question of the World Cup or a war.
I just shared my rambling with you all.
What’s your thoughts/perspective/observation on this ???
@codewizard@hear-me.social as I see it, time being artificial or not, the measurement of it is of utmost importance for the organization of society since the dawn of mankind. And even before that, life already organized itself by periods we now call time, see e.g. seasons and reproduction.
Time is not an artificial construct. Einstein showed that with his theory of special relativity, and more interestingly, he also showed that it’s not being run from a “centralised node”.
The “relativity” in the name of the theory talks to that, which is to say, time is not experienced equally by everything at the same rate. The rate at which time passes depends entirely on your frame of reference (or more broadly speaking, things in heavy gravity wells or moving close to the speed of light experience time at a different rate to those observing them.
kinda seems like time is an emergent property being caused by the illusion of distance, which is itself an emergent property of a holographic projection of lower dimensional base physical reality onto a higher dimensional space - as if we’re living in a multi-dimensional hologram being projected from a singularity
why does light not experience time? from the photon’s perspective, its created, travels any arbitrary ‘distance’ and is absorbed at its destination, all in the same instant . . . as if it didn’t actually go anywhere at all in the base layer of physical reality
The spacetime Einstein discovered is not the same stuff our clocks measure. The stuff on clocks is completely made up. That’s why the government can decide to delete an hour for daylight savings and our planet doesn’t explode from the overlapping of two different earths onto one moment.
Clocks don’t measure spacetime, they measure white people’s idea of time. And I specify white people, because different cultures have vastly different conceptualisations of time. Here in Australia, our First Nations had a much looser idea of the flow of time. The seasons don’t change because of a number on a calendar, the seasons change when the plants and animals decide the seasons change. Indigenous people’s idea of time is neither a physical nor human construct, but instead a construct invented by the landscape and ecosystem itself. That older conception of time hasn’t been destroyed by colonisation, because the land remembers it. You can’t erase that unless you kill all the plants and animals on the continent.
The spacetime einstein discovered is the same stuff our clocks measure. The system we use to measure it is arbitrary and loaded with social norms and context, and it isn’t time itself, but rather, a human made model of it, that exists to allow us to explain, interact with and navigate it.
Spacetime itself has no “units”. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to measure it. Ultimately, humans exist in time, we see things change, and we try to describe it. But that process of change that we’re trying to describe? That’s time, and that’s what Einstein was describing
That framing of the issue implies that time was invented for science, to measure the natural world. I believe time was invented for work. In First Nations culture, the seasons come with migrations to different areas, and obligations to the land to care for it in a manner specific to the season. That’s work. For white people, time helps plan the planting and the harvest, and later on, it helped decide the terms of wage labour, and when to attend church and fulfil one’s obligations to the gods. Military time was invented to organise military work. The different conceptualisations of time by different cultures and industries are explained by their different approaches to work. Capitalists divide time very precisely, to measure their wage labour. Communists like the First Nations have a looser conception of time because efficient land management practices gave them less need for excessive work.
All that is to say, the way time is conceptualised in our current society is a capitalist construct.
All that is to say, the way time is conceptualised in our current society is a capitalist construct.
No arguments here. But the way we conceptualise time is not time itself, just a framework for describing and understanding it.
Well now we’re talking linguistics. And I’ll throw out a fun conjecture without much thought: since people already use the word time to refer to social conceptions of time, referring to the scientific concept of spacetime as “time” is irresponsible, because of the risk that people will conflate the two.
I disagree that it’s irresponsible, because the difference rarely matters, and for the ELI5 style answer I was giving, that level of nuance would have been out of place.
I acknowledge there is a distinction, and that when it’s relevant, clear language helps avoid ambiguity. But I made a call to keep it simple in my response, which I stand by. Any ambiguity that was introduced will have been at least partially cleared up in this following discussion!
I’m with you on this. I don’t have any clocks in my house because I don’t like the way they mess with my internal sense of the passage of time.
There’s a difference between time and our measurements of time. The core concept of time, as in the rate of change of anything, isn’t an artificial concept. But the units we use to measure time are artificial.
The very idea of measuring the rates of things was invented by humans. In the natural world, things just are. Things just happen, and they don’t mean anything. Humans were the ones who came along and said “this is a second, it’s our SI unit, and now we can measure the change that happens in one second”. The natural world never divided spacetime into seconds.
I don’t think I agree with “time” being an artificial construct…. Hours, minutes and whatnot… sure. But “time” itself passes regardless of us attributing any sort of label or measurement to it.
Clocks are definitely artificial constructs meant to represent that idea.
I feel calendars are much more arbitrary though, many existed before, many exist today, many will exist in the future. Not only can they be used to represent anything in any direction, cosmic, imaginary or perceived, but they can start and end at any point you’d want them to, represented in a medium and interpretation of your choice.
How time works according to my brain: Me being 8-12 felt like a LIFETIME of memories…
