The clock is ticking (31.12.2025)

The clock is ticking…

Here is challenge for New Year’s Eve: define the word ‘time’. Don’t look it up in the dictionary, just think about it.

What’s your answer? Finding it difficult? I hope so, because ‘time’ is deeply mysterious. True, there is sunrise and sunset; we have our ticking clocks and there are the seasons too, but ‘time’ as a concept is more than this.

You probably know that there was no standardised clock-time in the UK until the railways. In the late 18th century, each town measured time by a local sundial. This was later standardised to a local meantime but even then, Bristol was still 10 minutes behind Greenwich. It wasn’t until 1880 that a unified standard was legally imposed on the country.

If the movement of the earth around the sun divides up our year, then we can say that ‘time = the measurement of change’. If nothing changes (the earth doesn’t turn and no atom moves in the entire universe) there is no time. Yet, since everything is moving, we have this dynamic experience (and understanding) of time as past, present and future.

This allows us to structure a mechanistic understand of time by dividing it into set periods of equal length such as seconds, minutes and hours. This helps us measure our lives and find a regularity that both the scientist and the artist can agree upon.

But there’s an obvious problem here: time stretches out when we’re bored, and shortens when we’re happy. It has a relative quality to it. Moreover, we experience our lives as something continuous, more like a ‘flow’ than a discreet set of units, so while this mechanistic understanding is useful, it doesn’t reflect our lived reality.

A good way to understand the difference is to think about watching a film. While the story flows seamlessly through different events, the film itself is composed of still frames that follow one after another.  We experience the flow, not the frames, so if we are asked, ‘which understanding is the correct one?’ we might struggle as both explanations are true and yet totally different.

This leads us to wonder about the concepts of past, present and future. They might help us make sense of the world, organising events in an orderly fashion, but what do we mean by them? Evidently, the past ‘contains’ events that have happened but no longer exist while the future will contain events that have yet to occur; the past is full and the future is empty. But what then of the present? We are only ever aware of immediate events, those that are happening ‘now’, yet ‘now’ seems to slip through our fingers. We can’t determine its duration. Is it a minute, a second, a nanosecond? To quote Henri Bergson in ‘Matter and Memory’: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” 

To complicate matters further, science might define time contrary to how we experience it, but physics, biology and chemistry have their own unique understandings. According to the physicist, the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversible, yet the biologist knows she can’t reverse the processes involved in a tree’s growth. Consequently, no matter how much we might wish to change the past we can’t go back in time to do so.

So, what is time? We might opt for ‘the measurement of change’ but what we mean by ‘measurement’ is the issue. As Henri Bergson said, “Time is invention and nothing else.”