by Ronald G Baars

Created on: April 10, 2011

Exploring the concept of time

            Time has often been called the 4th dimension, but what does that mean?  The first 3 dimensions define space.  You have the horizontal, vertical and depth.  If horizontal and vertical are axes represented on a piece of paper normal to the viewer, then depth is the dimension that is traveling directly away from the viewer.  Over the centuries humanity has developed many different techniques for measuring these quantities.  The first measurements were based on body parts, but because each person has a slightly different size of foot, for example, this system didn’t allow enough accuracy.

So over time, standardized versions of these measurements developed.  The English system of units is based on this heritage of measuring our surroundings by using a body part measurement as a guide. Therefore we get units like feet and hands, etc.  The ISO units come later, and they come from the idea of using the size of the earth as a measuring device.  This indicates a broader view of how to quantify space, but what can it tell us about time.

Time has gone through a similar process where people strive to quantify, or benchmark changes in their surroundings by applying a certain time to them.  As with the measurements of space, time and its units are based on the physical world and an attempt to quantify it.  The first measurements of time included sun dials, which reckoned the time in a given day, and calendars, which reckoned the days in the month.  Some calendars used the moon as their reckoning while more modern calendars use the earth’s orbit as their baseline, allowing it to define the number of days in a year and the number of hours in a day.  We also define the passage of time by delineating day and night and by tracking natural occurrences like sunrise and sunset.

That is all well and good but what is time?  To offer you one definition of time I would state that time is that commodity in which change occurs.  Without time there would be no beginning or end, no past or future and no movement.  Things would be frozen as if on an infinitely thin piece of paper.  One could even argue that without time there could be no space because space exists due to an expansion of materials over time.  In the physical world time also has a link to energy.  One example of the link between

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