Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Time

There's a special issue of Scientific American on the newsstands that features a series of articles on time. What is it, time travel, cultural ideas about time, and so on. One idea that seems to resonate throughout the first few articles is the idea that time does not "flow." That is, what we think of as the past and the future are subjective (relative) rather then objective (absolute). I can understand their arguments, but I can't sign on with them. My idea of time is, to paraphrase Matthew Broderick (said in character but I'm not sure who the character was), "Time is just... time just is." You get the feeling from the article that this is just yet another one of those instances where people spend much time, money, and ink of these ideas only because someone is willing to pay them to do so. Otherwise, they'd have to go out and get real jobs and stop arguing that "the passage of time is an illusion" (oh, so you're still being born?) or some such.