• Question: How is time structured?

    Asked by 374medb28 to Clare, Glafkos, Paul, Samantha on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Samantha Terry

      Samantha Terry answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      in a circle? time is made up anyway, no?

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      One phrase you need to remember is: space-time.

      This is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single interwoven continuum.

    • Photo: Paul Booker

      Paul Booker answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      I’m not sure your question is specific enough? Humans structure time with seconds, minutes, hours…years, centuries etc.

      A more fundamental way to think about time is looking at entropy. This is a measure of how disordered things are, and entropy increases with time, so you could say this is a way of structuring time.

      For example you used to be one cell big but are now a network of billions and billions of cells, so much less ordered (but far better!) than a single cell.

    • Photo: Clare Devery

      Clare Devery answered on 11 Mar 2015:


      I would have said that it’s structured by ourselves into seconds, minutes, hours and days. Certain scientific experiments are conducted using nanoseconds (very small units of time), but we measure other things in billions of years. Time is a massive scale. But having read the other answers on here, I’m not sure I’m interpreting your question properly!

    • Photo: Glafkos Havariyoun

      Glafkos Havariyoun answered on 17 Mar 2015:


      It’s not. Time’s current structure (seconds, minutes , days ) is just a convention there is no meaning to it whatsoever. You could come up with your own time structure. The way time has been structured is based on our perception of time -> morning, afternoon, night. It has been also structured around our need and abilities.

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