What is time?
Now there’s a question and a cold and wet Sunday is as good a time as any to attend a course on this topic. It was at London’s City Literary Institute and just one day. It was delivered by Radmilla Topalovic and it was mind-blowing.
We spent a lot of time looking at how time is expressed in terms of years, months and days and where the measurements and terminology came from. The story goes back to the Sumerians, but we can thank the 16th century Pope Gregory for the calendar currently used by most of the world.
Everything became more complicated when we moved on to quantum physics with talk of entanglement, quantum foam, quantum tunnelling and quantum electrodynamics. It maybe that time does not exist at the quantum level.
The main takeaways from the course were: there is no absolute time; for any particular person, time feels absolute, but it is all relative to you and where you are; beyond the sub-atomic level, time emerges from the notion of entropy or disorder; it may be that time is not fundamental to the universe.