@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 ???
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.
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!
True enough, but I’m more concerned about how our language influences our own thoughts than those of others. OP was clearly talking about colloquial time, and in your top level reply, you changed the topic to spacetime. If I may be so bold as to speculate on your internal world, I doubt you even noticed that you’d changed the subject, because the homonym smoothed over this disconnect and made it disappear.
This is a good example of how our linguistic norms directly influence our perceptions in some very dramatic, yet mostly invisible ways. Everyone is susceptible to this kind of influence. In our current society, only skilled rhetoricians have the ability to engineer language to control other people’s perceived realities. Naturally, these rhetoricians are employed by billionaires to push a Capital-friendly consensus reality.
If everyone had more knowledge of linguistic engineering, we could democratise both language and perception, giving more power to the people.