Coinciding with finding the time to clean off my desk, the discussion seems
to have come back around again. Kind of like an Arlo Guthrie song on a
guitar. Sooo, here they are, in their diversity:
There is some sense--easier to feel than to state--in which time is an
unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must
be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation
from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought.
--Bertrand Russell
Our destiny ... is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful
because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is the substance of which I
am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a
tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me,
but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am
Borges.
--Jorge Luis Borges
=46or us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and
future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.
--Albert Einstein
The ghost of time cannot permanently be laid.
--Mary F. Cleugh
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
--T. S. Eliot
It is a poor memory that remembers only backwards.
--White Queen to Alice
It is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future.
--Bertrand Russell
In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the
present, and the future is given in block, and the entire collection of
events, successive for us, which form the existence of a material particle
is represented by a line, the world-line of the particle. Each observer, as
his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which
appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in
reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his
knowledge of them.
--Louis de Broglie
The flow of time is clearly an inappropriate concept for the description of
the physical world that has no past, present and future. It just is.
--Thomas Gold
To realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
--Bertrand Russell
Apart from time there is no meaning for purpose, hope, fear, energy. If
there be no historic process, then everything is what it is, namely, a mere
fact. Life and motion are lost.
--Alfred North Whitehead
The relativistic union of space with time is far more appropriately
characterized as a dynamization of space rather than a spatialization of
time.
--Mili=E9 Capek
Relativity physics has shifted the moving present out from the
superstructure of the universe, into the minds of human beings, where it
belongs.
--P. C. W. Davies
The theory of relativity conceives of events as simply being.
--Adolph Grunbaum
It is not the theory of relativity which "conceives of events as simply
being . . . ," as Grunbaum claims, but rather Grunbaum, the philosopher,
who conceives of the world as being thus.
-- Richard Gale
What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I try to explain it
to one who asks me, I do not know.
--Saint Augustine, Confessions
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of the creative
process of nature without an overwhelming emotion al the limitations of
human intelligence.
--Alfred North Whitehead
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]