Time

Last night I watched Horizon on TV. Brian Cox who is without doubt very charismatic, was talking about time. 'What time is it?' he asked. I found the first half of the program slow and to be honest a bit irritating and I missed having DC here to bounce comments off. The second half got in to it a bit more; Einstein and space time and where this model runs into problems with particle physics which is Cox's area. There was a bit about membranes or branes. What I found didn't come over was the relation between time and objects.

Cox must understand this relationship but I guess if he hasn't thought about interdependence then it might not seem to be a valuable element in a program made for a TV audience. At this point I could digress to talk about the whole media machine which must be behind the program, Cox's appeal and how the mass media hugely affects the way people live their lives. Point made I'll return.

Time, what is our relationship to it. Ah, to it. Time is not an it, time is relation. We perceive things only because of change. No object exist in its own right and without objects what would we understand of time? Miles per hour, gallons per hour, unit per time interval, unit defined in relation to other units and objects per unit defined in relation to other units and objects. I recall school physics resolving formulas down to fundamental units of mass, length and time. All these units have standard definitions which of course involve objects. But the thing easily overlooked is that none of these objects exist in their own right; they are interdependent. They only exist in relation to other objects. We are bounded by our condition; our provisional knowledge, our technology, our bodies, our culture, our needs arising from our being. What we know of objects is a function of our being. There is no Archimedean point. Yet we need to know. It is in our nature. We went to the moon that's how strong it is. Desire. And we never get there, there is always more. Why? Is it because investigating reality from the limits imposed by the separation essentially part of the realm of form is like trying to work out what it is that's trying to work out what it is that is? Bits of the totality trying to see the whole whilst remaining separate.

I sometimes think of totality like a sort of blanket rumpled up. The rumples look out onto the landscape formed by the rumples. So it seems to rumples that they are separate but they are just blanket. The view that a rumple gets of the blanket is always limited to a relatively short distance and the view never seems stationary; it seems to keeps moving. But is it the view that moves or the blanket? I need to think more about the meaning of view and blanket here and the relation between stillness and movement; Yin and Yang.

There were moments in the program when a hint of the spiritual come over. Why? Because thoughts of time make us face our mortality? Because we somehow feel that it is about being? Because such investigations always seem to involve space and looking at the 'heavens'? The big questions make us reflect upon what we are. Maybe it's the nature of what that needs to be thought about. What is what?