Limelight: Time after time By Lubna Abdel-Aziz How often do we think of "time" -- all day, every day, all the time, it seems. According to the Oxford English Corpus, a recent survey found "time", the most used noun in the English language, while "the" is the most used word. It makes perfect sense. Think about it. How often does the concept of "time" cross our minds! Consider, a state: "the meeting starts on time;" a projection "this will take time;" a commodity: "Time is money;" an idea: "Time heals all wounds;" a philosophy: "Time waits for no man." There you have it, "time" pops up, all the time. The origin of the word is the Latin tempus which comes from the Greek temnein meaning "to cut". We use it to name products, songs, books, magazines, not to mention that menacing old sage: "Father Time". Scholars disagree on whether time itself can be measured, or whether it is merely part of our measuring system. has occupied many minds since Time's existence and has been a major subject for philosophers, artists, poets, and scientists. Celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, etc, have provided us with a reference for determining the different times, seasons, months, and years. Every culture has found ways of recording the passage of time. A walk through history reveals how man has searched for ways to keep track of that incredible, elusive passage of time. By 3100 BC, the ancient Egyptians devised a 365-day calendar following the rise of Sirius in the firmament, about the time of the annul inundation of the Nile, which was every 365 days. The Babylonians, 2000 BC, used a year of 12 alternating 29-30 day lunar months, giving a year 354 days. The old Coptic calendar, which remains an important reference, also follows a lunar system dating back to 284 AD. It is still an accurate forecaster of weather conditions, seasons, agriculture, and Nile flooding. There is no written record of "Stonehenge" built over 4,000 years ago in England, but its alignments include the determination of seasonal or celestial events, such as solstices and lunar eclipses. Time was considered the essence upon which life was based. An analogy comparing the time of life to the passing of sand through an hour-glass was transferred into a common device for measuring time. The Buddhists and Hindus conceived time as a wheel, consisting of cyclical repetitions of the ages -- if one could go far enough into the future one would ultimately return again to the past. The Biblical concept was linear, rather than cyclical -- the beginning being the act of creation, the end, being the day of judgement. China developed the first mechanical clock in the eighth century but clocks were not developed fully until the 13th century, probably by central European monks, calling people to attend church. The monastery bell became the community's measure of time. The English word "clock" comes from cloche, French for "bell". It was not until late in the 17th century that the pendulum was introduced, measuring short intervals of time accurately by the minute. As space is not a single dimension, neither is time. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) believed time and space form a container for events, which is as real as the object it contains. In contrast to Newton's belief in absolute space, Leibniz (1646-1716) thought of time as a fundamental part of an abstract conceptual framework, together with space and number. The earliest recorded philosophy of time was expounded by Phah Hotep (c. 2650-2600 BC) in ancient Egypt. "The wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit." In the Old Testament, time was a medium for the passage of predestined events -- "A time to give birth, a time to die..." (King Solomon, 970-928 BC) Time is equivalent to space and historically closely related to it, as with Einstein's (1879-1955) General Relativity Theory -- space-time. In explaining his theory Einstein is often quoted as saying that while sitting next to a pretty girl for an hour may seem like a minute, placing one's hand on a hot stove for a minute will feel like an hour. The interval between events is perceived differently by different observers. Time is one of the few fundamental quantities similar to other fundamental quantities like space and mass, defined through measurements. Around 500 BC Heraclitus, a fatalist, held that the passage of time and the future lay beyond the possibility of human influence: "You cannot step twice in the same river, for other waters, and yet others, go flowing on." Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his Critique of Reason described time as an "a priori" notion that allows us to comprehend sense experience (together with other "a priori" notions, such as space). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) also stated that "time is the condition of the possibility of succession." Throughout the ages the sun became the greatest measure of time. Today clocks, watches and other time-telling devices have become highly efficient, accurate, and indispensable, ticking away in minute fractions of a second. Their sounds tell us how fleeting life is. As they rush forward they remind us to hurry and do something useful while we can, before we are deprived of all time and space. We could go on, but is there time? The management of time has become among the most vital issues of modern life, spawning a variety of time-management tools Why does time appear to go fastest when we sleep? It goes even faster as we get older. Is it because each segment of time decreases our total experience, decreed for each one of us? I could go back and count how many times I used the noun "time"; instead I will concede to the Oxford English Corpus' latest study, and acknowledge that time is of the essence and soon will slip away. Have we wasted precious time here!? What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I do not know St. Augustine (354-430)
