Where is time?
To me that's a more interesting, even efficient, question than the more common "What is time?"
I'm in a kitchen right now. It's a space, an environment, an enclosure. I can stand at the sink, oven or fridge, or sit at the table and have my morning tea, but in all these spots I'm still enclosed by the kitchen, I'm *in* it. The kitchen is neatly defined by its four walls, so that I'm either in it or outside it. You might say that everything I do in the kitchen is happening "in kitchen," just like we say that absolutely everything that happens anywhere in the universe is happening "in time."
But where *is* this thing called time? I know where the kitchen is, but where's the Time-room everything's supposed to be happening inside of? How is it enclosing us?
Has anybody ever observed its walls, put them under a microscope? Maybe changed the wallpaper? 😏 Has anybody photographed it from the inside and out? It seems to me, not.
What if there is no such room?
Which is not to suggest that Time doesn't exist. Just that it's not the sort of enclosure-space we imagine. Perhaps it's not even remotely a place *in which* things happen, move, change, develop while the place itself statically remains an enclosure... like a kitchen.
"Space-time" is famously recognized as the dimension that makes our 3D universe actually a 4D one. Isn't that an interesting term, space-time? The way that physics tantalizingly unites the two notions without committing to either their identity or distinction? The term is more a question than a definition, isn't it, i.e., what are space and time and how are they inextricable from each other yet different? Definitions have a way of revealing how much we don't know as much as what we do.
In that vein it's telling how we use space to define (extrapolate, metaphorize) time. How long does it take for me to move the tip of my index finger from one ear to the other? Well, let's measure it--go get a watch. Okay, go. I'm moving my finger now a-a-and, stop! Ah, it took four seconds.
But what are four seconds? Four seconds are the distance (space) covered by the watch's second hand.
You may in fact, precisely as logically say that the second hand's movement was timed by my hand as vice versa. How long does it take for a second hand to move across four second marks on a watch face? Let's time it--go. Okay, I'm moving my finger from one ear toward the other--stop. It takes that long.
Both are the same thing, the movement of an object between two points. One we arbitrarilty call "motion" and the other "time," when really both are just motion.
Or... both are just time.
By an arbitrary calibration of distance and speed, i.e., distance covered by the hands of a clock at a certain speed across a field of marks, we've standardized this phenomenon of distance and velocity as Time, or at least the closest thing to an "enclosure" as we can dream up. So that now we find ourselves "within" the space of one hour as opposed to the next. Moreover we extrapolate this sense of enclosure and objectify it as a Time-room,--say, a tunnel or corridor--inside which everything that ever happens happens.
Yet, stil, nobody has ever seen the room. All we SEE is distance, velocity, motion, change, development.
I have a compelling sense the room isn't there at all. What we call Time is indeed the combined manifestation of distance, velocity, motion, development, change. At root, Time is change. Change doesn't happen "in time," rather change spawns time. No change, no Time. What time is ever measured, anywhere ever, in isolation from motion/change? So what, then, are you really measuring?
Which is why a watch is the perfect metaphor, since we look at the motion and change going on there and name it Time: "Oh, look at the time! I have no time! It's time to go!"
Which is subtly humorous, isn't it: because nothing is happening there that we humans haven't rigged to happen by our own devices, this prosaic, rudimentary turning of gears compelling a tiny metal bar to rotate. Yet we gaze at this creation of our hands (*on* our hands 😏) and it's a kind of hierarch--if not a god itself then summoning us to the altar of a Power transcending yet enclosing us in a merciless, frequently suffocating embrace: Time. And we hop at its bark...even though we programmed it to bark at us. 😄
We've objectified the combined phenomenon of motion, distance, speed and development into a thing, a place, greater than the sum of its parts. But maybe the parts really are just "parts," not a place enclosing them.
Perhaps "Time" isn't the "unknown god" conferring on the parts their ultimate instantiation. Perhaps the "unknown god" is Another. "Time" isn't our environment. Our environment is Another.
"For in him we live and move and have our being...."
"He is before all things, and in him all things hold together...."
"...sustaining all things by his powerful word...."
