Time, Objective Flux of

The concept of an objective flux of time, time that flows equally in all places, has existed for thousands of years. Humans have thought about time—its beginning, its end, and its characteristics in between—since before the advent of written history. Every culture had a creation myth, which inevitably included the idea of time itself. The incipient science that emerged in ancient Greece looked at time more objectively, searching for its nature. Aristotle, in the 4th century BCE, dissected the everyday term time into a mere number used for measurement. Although the number of something (in Aristotle's argument, movement) may be changed by adding or taking away an amount of the thing being measured, the number itself could not be changed. A concept like speed does not apply to a number, so time must flow continuously everywhere. Two centuries earlier, the Greek metaphysicist Heraclitus outlined his explanation of time's movement. His famous concept of flux, the constant change that everything in the world experiences at each moment, was in a way that of time itself. Time and change were inextricable, although not explicitly the same. Furthermore, since every event changes, time must be one of the main characteristics of all events. So Heraclitus defined time and events by each other, making each necessary for the other's existence. This agreed with his theory of the inherent unity of all objects. However, Heraclitus did not at any point deviate from the common idea that time passes at the same rate for all observers.

Time as a universal constant maintained its place in common belief with very few dissenting voices until modern times. In the 18th century, though, a renewal of interest in philosophy and discoveries in natural science gave birth to new schools of thought regarding the most basic ideas of all: time and matter. Bishop George Berkeley, in developing his philosophical theories, utterly rejected matter and time as real phenomena. The minds of humans and the ultimate mind of God were the only things he believed truly existed, and all other items that are usually considered concrete Berkeley reasoned to be thoughts in discrete people's minds. This included time, which became the procession of these thoughts through the mental landscape.

Another philosopher of the era, Immanuel Kant, also attempted to elucidate the elusive flow of time. He also labeled it a construct of the intellect, what humans use to order experiences into a useful form. It was one of the first substantially subjective views of time, since logically if time was a pattern coming from an individual's mind, it could and probably would be different for each [Page 1290]person. Still, neither Berkeley nor Kant managed to change the Newtonian outlook on time.

Isaac Newton stated unequivocally the objective and unchanging nature of time and space in his 17th-century masterpiece, the Pbilosopbiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Time itself never changed, although Newton acknowledged that the common means of measuring time may be inaccurate. Especially, he connected the idea of the inexorable flow of time with the amount of time that things exist, claiming that nothing could change the duration of existence of an object. Technology was not sufficiently developed until the 20th century to prove Newton wrong.

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