Time: It's Real, Baby

The anti-clock-change movement has really gathered some momentum. People squawk every year, particularly in the spring, when they lose an hour. Bills are introduced. Medical time specialists jack up the volume more each time: changing the clocks causes heart attacks, car accidents, or a terrible misalignment of circadian rhythms leading to depression and suicide. I doubt it, but if it's true, I ask how many lives could be saved with double standard time, so that it gets dark in DC at 3:00, and whether you'd really want to make the shift even if it improved your melatonin situation.

That above linked piece from the Post does indicate something: On earth as it is in heaven, time is real. It's real in the sense that it's not happening in our heads, but out in the universe: a feature of it, not us, or of us insofar as we’re part of the universe. It's relative, maybe, in some cosmic Einstein sense, but no more than everything else is. Note to Immanuel Kant: time isn’t the pure form of our interior sensibility. Time doesn't live in us; we live in it.

The argument that the scientists that the Post consulted make is that standard time centers the day around solar noon, which moves around a bit (I think), but not as dramatically as sunrise and sunset. Our biological rhythms are synced to solar noon, the scientists assert, so daylight savings time messes up all our hormones and such. More commonsensically, this morning some people drove to work through the dark, unlike last Friday, so they had a greater likelihood of crashing. On the other hand, a month ago, when the days were shorter, they were driving to work in the dark anyway.

But one thing this entails: on earth, time is as real as solar noon. Clocks and calendars of different types represent the very same real thing in different ways. Time doesn't care what you think about it. Time doesn't care how time seems to you, slower when you're bored, etc. You can represent it on a digital or an analog clock, for example, but there’s something you're representing. Solar noon doesn't care how the clocks are set. It doesn't care how you feel today. It happens exactly when it happens, and our rhythms happen with it. Like clockwork.

That one thing can be represented in different ways doesn't mean it isn't one thing, and it doesn’t mean it's not real. For example, a famous landmark can be photographed from different angles, at different times, in different lights, emphasizing different features. That is an indication that it’s real. That the Washington Monument looks different at night doesn’t make it into a purely subjective phenomenon.

There has been a war on time among scientists and philosophers for centuries, a constant tendency to impugn it. I can understand that, as time is a condition of anything happening, but is also a condition of all suffering. You wouldn't think that grand German metaphysicians and brilliant theoretical physicists would be worried about aging and death, but all people are worried about aging and death. Attacking time might be a way to attack mortality.

Researchers say time is an illusion, reports NPR in a typical drawing of completely unjustified hyperbolic conclusions from extremely complex data. In fact, every aspect they use to drive home the unreality of time presupposes the reality of time. Also, in your heart you know it's real. The devices mentioned in the first paragraph—atomic clocks that measure nanoseconds—measure something even according to the researchers operating them and the reporter writing about them. Sometimes I'm surprised what I have to say aloud.

It’s shocking that time can stretch or slow, although it's not the sort of thing that bears on the change to Daylight Savings or on your schedule today. Time can stretch in extreme gravitational force or at extreme velocities, etc. (I’ll mention that the idea of time “slowing down” isn’t coherent.) First, this doesn’t bear on our everyday experience at all. And second, that something can stretch or slow doesn’t show it to be unreal. I stretched, ran, and slowed just yesterday, and I am so real. Fabrics stretch: that doesn’t show that nylon doesn’t exist, NPR. At most it shows that nylon is surprising, which wouldn’t be possible unless it existed.

"In places where gravity is very strong," NPR points out, "time as we understand it can break down completely. At the edge of black holes, for example, the powerful gravitational pull slows time dramatically. And upon crossing the black hole's point of no return, known as its event-horizon, space and time flip." If time weren’t real, none of these assertions would be true. You can't be weird and shit unless you exist. Nothing that does not exist can break down.

NPR concludes from atomic clocks, time dilation around black holes, and the like, that time’s unreal and from the unreality of time, they conclude that capitalism, which they indicate invented time, sucks. They do it all right there in that very piece. But that authority figures and exploiters use time oppressively, or that we sometimes feel ourselves to be "slaves to the clock" doesn’t show that time’s unreal. And the assertion that it is does nothing concrete for human liberation which, if it’s to take place at all, will have to take place in the one time we all share, in which we're all embedded.

I enjoy the time change as an opportunity to become a bit more aware of time and to reflect on time's reality and on its relativity and on the way we represent it. It intrigued me as a kid. I think its effects are trivial at worst. We'll save an equivalent number of lives when we shift back this fall, I guess.

In Oppenheimer, the title character does a classic physics thing: “This cup, it consists mostly of empty space. Solidity is an illusion!” But all this indicates is that the atomic structures underlying solid objects were, momentarily, surprising. If the cup weren't solid you couldn't pick it up. All the nano and megaphysics and metaphysics in the world can't show us the cup isn’t solid; it can only show us something about what we already meant by “solid.”

And neither physics nor NPR has shown that time is unreal. It’s the reverse: they presuppose its reality with every breath, as we presuppose its reality when we change our clocks. I too think aging sucks and wish I could escape. But an hour later is as far as I've gotten.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell