Time's arrow

C. H. Holland

pp. 71-83

in: Robert Zwilling (ed), Natural sciences and human thought, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstrakt

I begin by stating that time is real. To do otherwise (as some famous philosophers from the past have implied) would be "philosophical extravagance"[6]. As Shallis [24] put it: "The fundamental perception of all mankind is the distinction between day and night, of the phases of the moon and the passage of the planets through the realm of the fixed stars. Time, in this context, is organic, cyclic, and sacred." Even as children we recognise the changing seasons. Fraser [8] reproduced an evocative drawing from the 1930s of a gathering of people gazing upwards: the title, "Our village stork returned, spring arrived!"