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Tallis in Wonderland

Seeing Time

Raymond Tallis keeps his eye on time.

All animals, all material objects, are caught up in events that seem to have a temporal location, a temporal order, and a temporal duration. Outside of human life, however, this is implicit rather than explicit. We alone table time and clock it. What is it about us that enables us to do this? I want to argue here that our sense of time as something ‘in itself’ is due at least in part to the strange, even paradoxical, character of vision. It is this, I believe, that has set us on a path in which our scientific understanding and our lived experience of time have diverged – something of which I have complained in a previous column (‘Time, Tense and Physics: A Theory of Everything But…’ in Issue 81).

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