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Time-The Greatest Figment of Human Imagination
- Mr. kedarnath jonnalagadda

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Some of the most commonplace 'things' that pervade the fabric of our existence are incredibly fascinting. Of these 'time' and 'space' occupy special places. But the incredibility of 'time' makes it fascinating and an all time great. Time is commonplace and all pervading that it is the very mileu of the world we live in. It is time for the baby to be born...it is time for it to cry... it is time to feed it and it is time to change its diapers... it is time to sleep... it is time to get up and it is time to catch the bus... it is time to get off and it is time to be in the office... I can go on and on until you think it is time to shut up. What exactly is time? You must think I have gone nuts, but the fact is that 'time is a figment of my imagination, it is a figment of your imagination and it is figment of our imagination'... In fact it is a figment of collective human imagination. It does not exist!!! And that makes it immensely fascinating. The whole thing about time is like the 'magic clothes' that the clever tailor made for the vain emperor in the bed-time story. He pulled a real fast one on everybody. He proclaimed that none except that those who were honest and truthful could see the clothes. So there was the emperor strutting around half naked (I think) on the streets and then a little chile spoke up. 'But mommy.. the emperor has no clothes'. That woke everybody up the story goes. So, it is with 'time'. Don't be surprised at all if your little kid exclaims some day, 'But mommy there is no such thing that can be called time'. Truly, 'time' is no entity. It cannot be weighed, nor measured! You probably think, 'this guys is nuts' and are shocked. If it is any comfort you are not the only one. I am shocked too. We have never measured time . We cannot. And this is imply because 'time' does not exist!!! But what about all the clocks, sundials, you favourite water proof watch and the lovable Big Ben. What do they do? Dont they tell us the time? Well, they are all clocks all right. And as the breed of clocks do they measure the gap between occurence of events. And these events have to be some phenomenon in nature. The simplest clock is the stick in the ground. It can be a sun dial. The shadow of the stick is here at sunrise and it is there at sunset. Anybody can make a clock from any cyclical phenomenon in nature. They can then arbitrarily devise some unit to show progression of the event. And then get his neighbour to agree with him. And then another neighbour and the whole neighbourhood... and so on until there is consesus of the majority in the population of the area. In history we have had diffwerent types of clocks, the stick in the ground, sundials, hourglasses with figures like women, water clocks, pendulums, quartz clocks, cesium clocks, name them. The 'truth' is that all of them have the foundation in the concept of 'sunrise' and 'sunset'. And then a lot of 'maths' and 'science and technology' went in to the concept and a great deal of ingenuity into establishing standards for time. These standards were needed because each person having his or her own reckoning of time would hardly contribute to social togetherness. You'd always be late for dates. All said and done, 'time' is very much like any 'language'. Different people may speak different languages but in order for them to understand each other - some commonly understood language is needed. So it is that international standards were evolved for time such as 'Greenwich Mean Time', 'Indian Stadard Time' and so on. But all this does not make 'time' anymore a 'reality' or anything more than a means for measuring some phenomenon in nature - and for us it is 'sun rise' and 'sunset'.

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