Wednesday Wisdom

Mr. Hand : Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?

Jeff Spicoli : Learning about Cuba, and having some food.

Mr. Hand : Mr. Spicoli, you're on dangerous ground here. You're causing a major disturbance on my time.

Jeff Spicoli : I've been thinking about this, Mr. Hand. If I'm here and you're here, doesn't that make it our time? Certainly, there's nothing wrong with a little feast on our time.

The 1982 comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High the character Jeff Spicoli played by actor Sean Penn gets into a discussion about the meaning of time. The quest to explain what time is as old, well time itself going back to the ancient Greeks of 400 BC. These ancient philosophers’ asked the epistemological question what is the of the essence of time. They called it Chronos or Khronos which translates into English as a year or a while.

Plato in his dialogue Timaeus (360 BC), explores the concept of time as moving image of eternity. Plato believed of the "eternal now", which refers to a philosophical understanding of time that suggests that all moments of time exist simultaneously and eternally. He proposes that past, present, and future are not separate and distinct entities, but rather a unified and timeless reality. 

Aristotle looked at the concept of time in his work Physics (350 BC) in its relation to motion, change and causality. He believed that there was an efficient cause, or the causality of action, which refers to the agent or force that brings about change or motion. Aristotle asserts that the efficient cause operates within a temporal framework. It takes time for a cause to produce its effect, and the measurement of that time is crucial for understanding the causal relationship between events. Aristotle argues that time is inseparable from the efficient cause because change and motion occur over a period. He sees time as a kind of measurement or "number" that represents the duration of causal processes. Without the element of time, causality and the progression of events would not be possible.

Plato viewed time as cyclical while Aristotle believed time moved linear. Although these philosophers differed slightly in their concepts, both believed that time was a function of motion and change among the cosmos. They also believed that time moves in one direction-forward.

 2023 why do we care?

We make take for granted the knowledge unavailable in ancient Greece on how we can measure time by the cosmos. A day being a complete rotation of the earth on its axis as 24 hours and a solar year the complete rotation of the earth around the sun in 365.25 days from vernal equinox to the next. The calendar year is helpful in organizing and tracking time but really is a subject human construct.

What is time, and why does it only go in one direction -forward? the concept that time flows in one direction is called the arrow of time. This means that events occur in a sequence from the past, through the present, and into the future as Plato suggested. We also experience time as a linear progression of seconds, minutes, hours days and years, moving forward and leaving the past behind as Aristotle surmised.

Thermodynamics is the branch of physics that explains the relationship between matter and energy. It looks at systems and how they behave under conditions of temperature, pressure and volume. The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed but transferred or converted. The second law of thermodynamics looks to explain the behaviors of systems* and how they tend towards more entropy and can only be constant or increasing. This is the basis for the Big Bang Theory which scientists call the moment of singularity or a starting point. This point was of infinite density and temperature and low entropy. The universe expanded, cooled and continues towards higher entropy or disorder. Entropy is a statistical measurement of chaos or randomness and measures all the possible configurations of a system without changing the macro state. Simply stated, energy finds the easiest way to transfer itself from one state to another in any form and almost always expanding, like the universe itself. The more entropy or chaos, the more the universe expands which is why time moves in a observable forward direction.

The concept of arrow of time comes from the second law of thermodynamics which states that systems tend to move towards more change and as we observe the change, it moves in one direction, the future. However, a tendency is a statistical probability and describes how we experience linear time going forward. Physics also leaves open the statistical possibility that time might not have to go forward.

*Systems in physics refer to a defined region or object being analyzed from a campfire, a rock rolling down a hill, an atom or the cosmos where heat and energy is transferred.

And now you know...

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.