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Articles

Calling Time

Anthony Proctor asks: Are we on time? Do we have time? What is time?

Not only is time a long-standing mystery in itself, but it is also at the heart of many other mysteries, paradoxes, and misunderstandings. For instance, backwards time travel could lead to anomalies such as the famous ‘grandfather paradox’, where you go back in time to kill your grandfather, thus preventing your own birth. Or, time appears to progress, but we cannot ask ‘how fast?’ as there is no meaningful answer: one second per second is hardly a meaningful answer to the question ‘How fast is time flowing?’. And time is the only physical quantity that we can experience by thought alone, but when we do so, it sometimes appears to progress more swiftly, or more slowly, than at other times.

Even hundreds of years ago St Augustine was well aware of the problematic nature of time: ‘‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know" (Confessions, c.

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