Topics Time

Question We are often told time is like a river. Are there other useful analogies for time? For example: Time is like a bowl of jello with fruit: time is the jello and events are the fruit stuck in it. I guess what I'm really asking is does time have to flow? Is there another way of thinking about time?

Accepted:
October 5, 2005

Comments

One of my favourites is from Santayana, who says that the present is like a fire that runs along the fuse of time. That captures our sense of past, present and future each having a different ontological status, an intuitive view that philosophers have not found easy to defend or even to make very clear.

Thinking of time as flowing obscures far more than it clarifies, on my view, and I think that the river analogy is dangerous. Anything that flows flows at some rate. How fast does time flow? Sixty minutes per hour? The image raises the prospect of a supertime against which the flow of time occurs, and that raises a nasty regress. Better to think of time as a dimension of the universe, but one that is anisotropic,t hat is, one in which going in one direction is different from going in another, unlike, say, East-West travel.