"The pace of modern Western life, with its fast food, express delivery, instant coffee, sell-by dates, speed-dating, speed-dialling, etc, as well as our reliance on clocks and the constant time pressure we seem to find ourselves under, would probably be absolutely incomprehensible to someone just a hundred years ago."
"There is general agreement among philosophers that time is continuous (i.e. we do not experience it as stopping and starting, or darting about at random), and that it has an intrinsic direction or order (i.e. we all agree that events progress from past to present to future)."
The French phenomenologist and intuitionist philosopher Henri Bergson formulated a view of time that was neither a real homogeneous medium nor a mental construct, but possesses what he referred to as “duration”. He saw the apparently fluid flow of time as actually composed of a myriad tiny temporal particles, which are pieced together by our consciousness.
In the disconnected time streams in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, some could be linear and others circular; time could continuously branch and bifurcate, or different time streams could even merge and fuse into one; the laws of causality and succession could break down or just not apply; etc, etc.
Marcel Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27), though, ignores the constraints of linear time completely, constantly intermingling past and present.
We do not so much perceive time itself, but changes in or the passage of time, or what might be described as “events in time”.
ASince Albert Einstein published his Theory of Relativity (the Special Theory in 1905, and the General Theory in 1916), our understanding of time has changed dramatically, and the traditional Newtonian idea of absolute time and space has been superseded by the notion of time as one dimension of space-time in special relativity, and of dynamically curved space-time in general relativity.
Time travel is not possible in Newtonian absolute time (we move deterministically and linearly forward into the future). Neither is it possible according to special relativity (we are constrained by our light cones).
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