Perception of time

Before being considered a real-world dimension, time as a fundamental human experience was used to regulate social and individual life. On a personal level, cyclical activities and biological/survival behaviors like nutritional habits, digestion cycles, blinking, and breathing comprise the temporal mechanisms that construct our primary experience of time. The repetitive patterns in natural events like seasonal changes and day-night cycles constitute our experience of time in relation to the outer world. As John Potts observes: “Time in traditional cultures and in ancient religion was conceived not as a straight line, but as a cycle. The idea of progress, of time moving forward to an improved social state, was unknown in the ancient world, even in the great civilizations.”[1]

To be able to apply these patterns to order events and create a scaffolding to configure our social behaviors, our civilization is historically tied to the invention of different measuring devices to keep time. Although the calibration scales vary drastically, the design concept is almost the same: to recognize a specific duration in the flux of frequent happenings.

Ancient Egyptians' obelisk is one of the earliest human inventions of this sort. Casting a shadow on the ground, it could tell what part of the day or year it was. Sixteen hundred BCE Egyptian astronomical device called merkhet was an upgrade to determine time independent from daylight by observing stars' locations. Water clocks and sand clocks were invented based on the controlled flow of sand and liquids from one chamber to another to indicate the passage of time. Eventually, the mechanical clock emerged at the turn of the 14th century and became a symbolic sociocultural sign in the Christian monastery context.

All these technologies helped us to measure the flux of time and allocate unique marks to the beginning and end of our activities, to set bigger communal targets, expand our communities, and eventually orchestrate more complicated missions.

Our general perception of time shifted from cyclical to linear with the emergence of Abrahamic religions and the shift in cosmological perspectives on the creation of the universe. Adopting the religious worldview satisfied our evolutional biologic trajectory of being born, growing up, and ending up in death. In essence, existence found a birth point, and the religious stories of the past became the guidebook to the future.

Although the chronological time view is contrariety to the cyclic experience of time mentioned before, it doesn't challenge human cognitive capacities and is convenient to comprehend. All we expect to know to relay our social experiences considering time as an objective phenomenon, revolves around the order, duration, and frequency of events. We ask, "when?" To eliminate the element of shock. We ask, "how long?" to broaden our scope of tolerance. We ask, "how often?" to predict the future.

The scientific study of time began in the 16th Century and continued in the 17th Century with the work of Sir Isaac Newton. In classical physics, time is considered one of the fundamental scalar quantities and is also considered to be absolutely the same for everyone everywhere in the universe. In the Absolute (also sometimes known as “Newtonian”) conception, time is a measurable quantity independent of space that exists even in an empty universe and acts as the container of space. In Newton’s words: “absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external”.[2]

Since Albert Einstein published his Theory of Relativity, proposing the notion of four-dimensional space-time, our understanding of time has changed drastically. In relativity, modern physicists regard time as an integral part of the material universe, neither succeeding nor flowing in the Newtonian sense as a sequence of events. Both the past and the future are there.

The general view in physics on the birth of time and space proposes that the universe emerged about 13.8 billion years ago with the explosion of a point consisting of infinite mass and all the space, called the Big Bang. However, there are opponents of this line of thinking, like Roger Penrose. In his book Cycles of Time, Penrose theorizes an Extraordinary New View of the Universe that the Big Bang was the end of another universe, and the end of our universe will initiate the next one.[3] The former can be identified as a parallel interpretation of linear time by science and the Judeo-Christian religions. In contrast, the latter is associated with the traditional understanding of time as ongoing cycles of events.

[1] Potts, John. The new time and space. Springer, 2015, 12.

[2] Newton, Isaac. "Scholium to the Definitions in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Bk. 1 (1689); trans. Andrew Motte (1729), rev. Florian Cajori." (1934): 6-12.

[3] Penrose, Roger. Cycles of time: an extraordinary new view of the universe. Random House, 2010.