Fifteen Models of Time
To get things started and help build up some content, I’m going to pull something from the archive. Friends will forgive getting something they may have already seen (although some new models have been added) and hopefully new readers will enjoy it. It comes in the form of a list of different models of time one might have (taxonomists love lists).
Many of these I’ve experienced or been shown, and all of them, I think, are useful in some way or another, if only to make us interrogate our own, often-too-tightly-held models. Some I even think are true (if we can put aside what that even means for a moment) and I still choose to believe them on days of the week that start with T.
Regardless, here they are:
Time is pixelated, just like space, and not smooth. Continuity is a useful fiction, but just a mathematical ideal like Platonic solids.
Time evolves continuously but is observed quantized, like frames of a movie being captured by a camera.
Time is a crystal growing from both the past and the future and trying to reach equilibrium in the everlasting, slowly crystallizing now.
Time is a solid and the past and the future are already written in the block universe. Our consciousness appears to slide along a path from past to future, but that is an illusion caused by memory.
Time is a tree, marking the branches of many worlds, all of which happen but only one of which we will experience.
Time is a conversation that we call the present, taking place between potential futures and possible pasts.
Time is a computation, marking the algorithmic steps required to compute each state of a possible mathematical universe.
Time is gravity, and an incomprehensibly huge mass is pulling us toward it in a fourth spatial dimension (and our space is just the three dimensional surface of a hypersphere collapsing towards it).
Time is a narrative, authored by a conscious being and written down in our memories as the only way we can make sense of the world.
Time is a series of quantum transactions, of handshakes between electrons agreeing to swap photons across fractions of nanometers or billions of light-years.
Time is the dual of frequency, the unescapable uncertainty of sampling energy.
Time is entropy, a probability distribution over possible distinguishable states, tending towards higher probability ones.
Time is distance, turned inside out and made relative by the fact that our one clock, the speed of light, can only measure the ratio of distance and time.
Time is a fractal Möbius strip, with each moment infinitely divisible into smaller self-similar moments which eventually loop around and are revealed to actually be aeons. Eternity in every femtosecond.
Time is a helix, and the sequential instances we experience are just the points where it crosses our position on the circle. If we moved a bit around the circle, we’d see a different set of instances interwoven with the old ones.
As I’ve discussed these models with friends, different people seem drawn to different models, captivated by them or comforted by them. Which do you find beautiful or want to be true? Which are alarming?