Resetting the Time

My grandmother’s friend Mrs. Moyse disapproved of daylight savings time. We should stick to God’s own good time, she told me in all sincerity. Blasphemous or not, this Sunday morning my household reset all our clocks that didn’t magically reset themselves.

What is time, anyway? Time flows, time flies, time’s a-wasting. We spend it, save it, use it, run out of it. We’re pressed for time or have time on our hands. Is it divine will, human invention, practical resource, or a fundamental of physics?

Einstein wrote in a letter, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” I'm happy to treat time as a fourth dimension, letting me denote a when as well as a where. When I try to follow Einstein deeper into relativity and the warping of spacetime, alas, I can’t wrap my head around it. Believe me, I’ve tried. The distinction between past and future seems as real to me as between the distinction between above and below, right and left, or behind and in front of.

If time is meaningful only in our minds, isn’t the same true of much else we consider real? Beauty, truth, justice, hope, even meaning itself? Take sentient life out of the picture and what remains but the interactions of matter and energy, space and—maybe—time? I’ll keep trying (and likely failing) to grasp the physics of it. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to reset the clocks twice a year. I doubt God objects.

Image: Christophe Carreau, Spacetime Curvature, European Space Agency, 2015.