Hello.
What a nice night of internal imagery and imagination presented in a most cranial way I just had.
I won't tell you about that though. But just so you know, it was lovely.
I think the current post I write will go on about your regular theories of time and space, space and time, spacetime... For instance, I've been on a meditative tip recently, and successfully so, and not to keep quiet about that! The meditation has been deep and I've been deeply, deeply relaxed and massively and hugely open to internal and cranial susceptibilities, such as those of time and space, and spacetime, etc... I'm actually ripe for the theorising, so let's get to it, and theorise, and do it well, for all and sundry.
What is time? As we know it, it is the ticking of clocks, it is relative, and it is common to feelings of boredom or excitement. Time passes slowly for the bored, but if you're excited and manipulated, it goes fast, too fast sometimes. It passes at the relative rate of one second per second, is a tight little invisible concept, and herein lies the very interesting thing about time. It is invisible to the eye, like many things, and passes, and when we look, it disappears.
For example, there are many features of physics and the natural world, that are seemingly invisible, and can only be experienced in a somewhat indirect means. One may take as an example, the first if you will, of water. We look at water and we wonder how something that is, something that has a form, something that is an object of sorts, is actually clear, and in many ways invisible. Water must have been one of the earliest primordial intellectual concerns. These days we have no qualms about it, it's natural. But I suppose children might think about why water is clear. Once we know that we are witnesses to a liquid made of sparsely jiving particles, we no longer worry.
And then, as another example, there is oxygen - air! Primordially, we may not have understood about air, and from antiquity we have realised that we have before us another substance that is completely sparse and jiving. It is something, yet it is clear, see through, we love it, we know it, we feel it, but we can't see it. In any case, it is clear, there is something to be said about things being clear.
As another example, and yet more invisible, yet clearly palatable, is gravity. Gravity is inscrutable enough that we have had to be surreptitious about it for many years, and we only recently began to understand this. Newton was of the notion that gravity was some sort of action at a distance, and Einstein realised that gravity is a curved spacetime. Gravity is a strange phenomena that seems to match this notion about invisible concepts.
Yet another example to go on would be the reign of inner experience itself, which is invisible, so invisible. How might you explain to an alien who has visited Earth from far away, that we can touch and feel, that can sense things by touch, that we have sensations? Furthermore, how would we explain that we are able to harbour an inner intuition and harbour knowledge. In fact, it is only by common familiarity that we are able to do this for other humans. Thoughts are invisible, yet they are physical; we cannot see them, yet we know about them.
So, the fifth example of invisible phenomena is, obviously, time. Now, time passes at a rate of one second per second, so in effect it's value is naturally just one. Time, therefore, is one, like consciousness.
But what I'd like to say about time is this. If you can imagine a sphere, which incidentally is rotating in all possible directions at once, perhaps at the speed of light, perhaps the rate of the magnitude of the acceleration due to gravity, think of this. Take a vector on the sphere, tangent to the surface, and send it round the sphere. Whichever direction you move the vector, it makes no difference to the constitution of the sphere. A cube would be different, for keep fixed the vector in that instance and there is always a way of telling your orientation. A sphere is always the same, and thus there is only on direction on a sphere. And this is like time; time has the single direction, i.e. always forwards. Time only moves forwards, in this one direction, unlike space in which we can move forwards and backwards and all manner of directions. This, I believe, is a matter of entropy, which is the idea that time can only move in one direction, and that there is in fact an "arrow of time".
One other thing I would like to point out is that, in the context of this single direction, there is a deeper notion to be seen. And this is that time is not merely the fact of a value moving in a single direction, but moreover the fact that there is a direction at all. This might be seen to be going the way of dual space. The dual of a time vector would be a dual time vector, namely, the fact of a direction in the first place. This is fundamental, and in fact, time is a fundamental fact, a fundamental value, and the value of time is one.
To be continued...