Time: A relative construction

The sequential, programmed reactions of hydrogen particles; a process that is uniform throughout as a means to construct the human unit of time. Fascinating and precise.

Yet even on earth, time is a relative construct that has been shaped politically or otherwise with the overall goal of fulfilling a partcular motive, ulterior, genuine or otherwise. Whilst Greenwich meantime has been accepted as the basis from which the world anchors its time structure, the earth is not in fact divided up into 24 equal time zones. Some nations such as Nepal for instance, have zig-zagging time zones that don't correspond to the unitised zonal time system. And as demonstrated by the Treriksrøysa border point (the point at which the borders of Russia, Finland and Norway converge) time is different from one spot to another. The three nations on all sides of the Treriksrøysa point adhere to different time zones. In practice, ice hockey teams from the border zones of the three countries travel backwards or forwards in time on each and every occassion of them crossing the border for a match. Hence, people of this region, despite being almost in the same place interpret a common concept differently and therefore structure their lives differently too.

Ergo from different reference points there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events.

Thus, time is a socially constructed concept of something that is in fact completely different to all the numerous and detailed forms of perception that we have engineered in order to comprehend it. In similar vein, just as the Scottish philosopher David Hume propagated, objects consist of their properties and nothing more. An apple is red and juicy because these are the properties we synthesise in order to comprehend what the apple is. We assign it properties to aid the process of differentiating it from other objects in the universe, and in so doing distort its actual form. The same is true of time. Measuring it, is like looking at a text through a magnifying glass; the font appears larger and more detailed, and indeed it is from our point of view. The reality of the situation is however that the text is a lot smaller in it's innate form. Our synthesis of time into units (seconds, days, years etc...) provides regularity to a process that is both imperfect and relative. We construct a reality that doesn't neccessarily reflect the substancial truth.