“What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it… I do not know”, famously quipped Saint Augustine. Our modern understanding of time is more scientific than ever, and many of us likely do now think we know how to explain time. While impressively the Swiss atomic clock has a range of uncertainty of 1 second in 30 million years. But the time of physics is not real time. Time is not a mathematical abstraction, there is no line of time, and the present is not some indivisible zero-point on it. 

Time is mathematical abstraction

From sundials and water clocks to hour glasses and weight-driven mechanical clocks, timekeeping devices have a long and fascinating history, driven mostly by an unrelenting quest for better precision. Nevertheless, we should remember that the usefulness of any timekeeping device depends on our gathering information through our senses, usually by looking—the location of the shadow projected on a sundial, the position of the hands of a clock, the readings of the vibrational frequency of a quartz crystal—and thus relates directly to our lived experience. A timekeeping device translates the ineffable experience of passage into the language of numbers. In doing so, it appears to reify time, giving it a mathematical precision comparable to that of physical measurements, such as distance, weight, speed, or pressure. The more precise the clock, the more distant clock time seems to be from becoming, passage, and duration.