What is this thing we call Time ?

Time is a strange thing......

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as " the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole"


The Online Free Dictionary describes it as , "a non-spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future"


or 


 "an interval separating two points on this continuum; a duration...


I can remember clearly the long hot summer holidays of my youth where the endless blue skies were captured and indelibly imprinted in my memories as if the moment was like an extended pause along this "non-spatial continuum"..

yet further on down the road................

I can also clearly remember the pressures of time and the lack of hours in the day to fulfill my work commitments........my days are divided into working hours and the years progress and the cultural context of my concept of time becomes my reality.

But is this the only reality of time ?

I have the power to reflect and consider other perspectives.

Take for example the Eskimo culture where the sun stays above the horizon or below the horizon for periods of up to six months at a time. For the Eskimo culture time is not a continuum of day/night cycles. Their time is measured by the number of sleeps they have.


For many cultures in the past the idea of time was the repetition of the cycles of the weather, the moon and the sun.  Things came and went in much the same fashion as we experience our bodily functions.

So what is this thing we call time ?

Well time is subjective and personal...the experience of time alternates with a person's social , cultural  and historical context.

So if time is subjective and experienced differently by different cultures and different periods in the history of humankind what can be said about objective time ?

By objective time I mean the concept of time surrounding us in the universe ..

or another phrase for it is endless time ? 

How does endless time capture our concept of personal time ?

I suggest we must look at a mathematical equation to understand the dimensions of time.

If space is endless ; then time is endless

endless space = endless time

So to understand time we should dissect it with space.........it becomes an x-y axis where x is time and y is space....

So on any given point in the continuum of endless time our imprint is captured in endless space.

So what does all of this mean apart from some blogger philosophically ranting on about the concept of time ?

Think of it this way.....

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Albert Einstein