time

What is time?

Everyone knows what time is. We can practically feel it ticking away, marching on in the same direction with horrifying regularity. Time has enslaved the Western world and become our most precious commodity. Turn it over to the physicists however, and it begins to morph, twist and even crumble away. So what is time exactly?

To many people throughout history time would have been synonymous with the rhythms of nature; the passing of the seasons and the cycles of the celestial bodies. If this idea seems naive today, it's not only because modern clocks are infinitely more accurate time keepers than the celestial bodies ever were. It's also because we've come to think of time as something universal, something that would keep marching on even if all clocks, celestial or man-made, were to stop. The notion of an absolute time, one that's measurable and the same for all observers, was expressed most succinctly by Newton: "absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.