Studying time makes this philosopher tick
We all know that time passes — or so it seems. But what do we think time is really doing? Is it moving by us? Standing still as we wade through it? Our inability to resolve this question is revealed by the indirect way in which we discuss the subject. “When you ask people, ‘Tell me about the passage of time,’ they usually make a metaphor,” says Brad Skow, an associate professor of philosophy at MIT. “They say time flows like a river, or we move through time like a ship sailing through the sea.” The subject gets more complex when we consider that in the theory of relativity, time is just one dimension of a universal fabric we call spacetime. Yes, things change and people age, but relativity implies that points in time are locationally different, in some sense, rather than whizzing past us and vanishing from the universe forever. In philosophy,...
