What is time? A quick and brief reflection from various people with no time at all‏

Nothing but a fourth dimension, 

after length, breadth, and thickness.

There is no difference between time 

and any of the three dimensions of space 

except that our consciousness moves along it.

The world remains, always, 

a bundle of processes evolving in time.

Logic and mathematics 

capture aspects of nature, 

but never the whole of nature. 

There are aspects of the real universe 

that will never be representable in mathematics. 

One of them is that in the real world 

it is always some particular moment.

We have a limited perspective. 

At any instant we see only a slice of the loaf, 

a puny three-dimensional cross-section of the whole. 

For the modern physicist, 

reality is the whole thing, 

past and future joined in a single history. 

The sensation of now is just that, 

a sensation, and different for everyone.

Instead of one master clock, 

we have clocks in multitudes. 

And other paraphernalia, too: 

light cones and world lines 

and time-like curves 

and other methods 

for charting the paths 

of light and objects 

through this four-dimensional space. 

To say that the spacetime view of reality 

has empowered the physicists 

of the past century would be an understatement.

We say that time passes, 

time goes by, and time flows. 

Those are metaphors. 

We also think of time 

as a medium in which we exist. 

If time is like a river, 

are we standing on the bank watching, 

or are we bobbing along? 

It might be better merely 

to say that things happen, things change, 

and time is our name for the reference frame 

in which we organize our sense 

that one thing comes before another.

Time is what prevents everything happening at once.

We don't have time, because we loose the tempo...

Time out.