Late last year I posed the question….. what are clocks designed to do? I got all sorts of interesting replies and it confirmed my belief that time is an extremely confused subject in the modern world. As I develop this story I will reveal the answer, but why don’t you ask yourself what you think time is and what it is that clocks are designed to do.

The obvious answer might be that clocks tell time. Clocks don’t tell time per se, rather they measure an aspect of our world. For now let’s just say that time is an abstract term for a very common phenomena that most of us take for granted. Einstein was the first to say that time was the 4th dimension, an even more abstract concept and one of his few miscalculations.

I’ve read books on the Western notion of time and it seems that even the experts can’t agree as to what time is.

Here are some official definitions of time.

Websters defines Time as….

1a : the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues : duration
b : a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future

2: the point or period when something occurs

Wikipedia defines Time as….

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects.[1] The temporal position of events with respect to the transitory present is continually changing; future events become present, then pass further and further into the past.

Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars.

Time is used to define other quantities — such as velocity — so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life.

The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy.

Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other “times” persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line.

The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of “container” that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.

No wonder time is confusing. The above definitions while useful don’t actually define time as a thing as the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant concur. Time it seems is more of an intellectual construct. A construct we use to measure aspects of our world and not a thing in and of itself.

Mainstream science is finally coming around to this conclusion as recently evidenced by the
article “Scientists suggest Space-time has no time dimension”.

Scientists propose that clocks measure the numerical order of material change in space, where space is a fundamental entity; time itself is not a fundamental physical entity.

Some researchers theorize that  Newtonian ideas of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.

 

“Time as the numerical order of change”  now we are getting somewhere, but I think it can be simplified even further.

TRACKING DOWN TIME

Those of you familiar with my work on Maya Meso-America Calendrics might consider me an expert on the question of time. Calendars measure and keep track of time by counting days, weeks months, years decades and so on. Before the advent of micro-time keeping devices such as sundials, hourglasses and clocks the most basic whole unit of time was a day-night cycle. We might surmise that time is related to the day-night cycle, but what is a day-night cycle?

STOP DON’T MOVE !   Impossible I say !

A day-night cycle is how we experience the earth’s axial rotation as it orbits the sun. And what is rotation? Rotation is a type of movement.  Therein lies the answer to the question of what clocks do. Clocks are designed to keep pace with the earth’s rotation and rotation is a type of movement. We may therefore conclude that time is the equivalent of movement.

Now… how does my conclusion square with “time as the numerical order of change”.   We can drop the ‘numerical order” part because those are the labels we affix to the increments of change in order to measure and classify change.

I CAN’T CHANGE !  If you can move you can change.

So what is change? The dictionary defines change as “to make or become different”.   But how does something become different?  Something changes because some aspect of the thing in questions has moved. Movement in the chemicals of a leaf leads to color change and when you’ve changed your hair it’s because someone moved a pair of scissors through it.  Everything is constantly moving relative to everything else and that gives us change.  In an absolutely frozen universe nothing would move.

Time would stand still since we can only measure time in relation to things moving relative to one another. Therefore time as an entity in an of itself is the equivalent of movement.  Time is a convenient term because of all the connotations and implications inherent in the layman concept of time. It is much easier to say “what time is it” than to say “how much has the earth moved since the sun came up”.

NO TIME FOR TIME

Native Americans inclusive of the Maya did not have a word for time and some have suggested that the Maya word closest in meaning to our idea of time is their word for movement.

Maya-Meso-American Calendrics (MMAC) views the world as the interplay of two fundamental principles—movement and measure.

Measure, according to MMAC cosmology, may be understood as the phenomenal world in terms of dimensions defined or bounded by color, form and periodicity. Periodicity may be defined as recurring sequences of time having specific qualities. A sequence of time within MMAC cosmology starts with a day-night cycle, but identifies many other sequences each with its defined number of days.

Now contrast the Maya-Meso-American view of the cosmos with the Western view of the cosmos as having 3 dimensions of space—width, depth and height.

We can say that Western cosmology is object and quantitatively focused, while MMAC cosmology is qualitative and process focused.  The difference in focus is verified by a linguistic analysis that finds European languages to be structured around an emphasis on nouns or objects whereas native American languages are structured around an emphasis on verbs or the process of objects.

Western science has gone on to develop material science to astonishing heights and depths while the process focused mind of the ancient Meso-American went on to discover the very structured process of time itself. That is the very structure and order of change as movement. A discovery that I consider is the greatest natural history discovery of all time!!

The implication of structured or sequenced change as a fundamental cosmic order means that change as movement follows predetermined paths.  And that means that the change we experience in our lives is not random, ruled by chance or accidental, but rather follows a very specific set of rules or sequences.

In an infinitely ordered cosmos everything is infinitely interrelated and therefore infinitely synchronized since everything moves as a singular whole. A whole whose entire movements are interrelated by a singular knowable set of rules.  Those rules are encoded in the Maya Meso-American Tzolkin calendar and now you know why I refer to my work on Tzolkin cosmology as the Art and Science of Synchronicity (ARTSOS).

You may learn more about the magical world of Tzolkin Cosmology in the Synchronicity section. Introductory articles are found at the top and get more advanced as you read down the list.

Wikitime

Related Posts:

• The Universal Meaning of 2012 and the Mayan Calendar. The Mythos, Astronomy and Sociology of 2012-MC
• MMAC OS 1.0: Does the Universe have an Operating System? Discover for Yourself
• The 11:11 Enigma Decoded ! pt. 2
• Silver, Monetary Policy and The Assassination of JFK: A Case Study In Synchronistic Phenomena
• Thematics and Energetics: A Cosmology of Color, Form, Movement and Recurrence: ARTSOS 8
• Tracking the Tzolkin-Cosmocycle and Applying The Tzolkin-Cosmo Codes: ARTSOS 10
• SPIKES IN EARTHQUAKE FREQUENCY and Intensity Linked to Tzolkin Cycle Hyper-Days
• Targeting a New World Age: At the Cross Roads of Cosmic and Earthly Synchronicity
• The Art and Science of Synchronicity Investigates 11:11 and 11-11-11