Andrew asked:

Is time an object or is it a perspective?

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More likely the latter. Consider that time is not an observable: it is something we inject into our
experience. Even Newton, who believed that time was absolute, could do no more than put a 't' into
his equations to stand for time. Unlike gravity, which, though we don't know what it is, can at least be
observed, time cannot.

Nevertheless there are many ingenious theories, both philosophical and scientific, which attempt
somehow to account for time. The two which loom largest on our horizons are Kant's (time is an a
priori matrix of experience) and Einstein (time is a coordinate in the spacetime manifold). In this
context, there is an interesting book by Adolf Grunbaum you might like to chase up: Philosophical
Principles of Time and Space,where the author tries to give a causaltheory of time.

A radically divergent point of view was proposed centuries ago by Leibniz. You can read about it in
the Correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke, which was underestimated for the whole time that
Newton's theories held sway. Today the temper is changing; Leibniz is on the way to being
rehabilitated. His idea is that time does not exist at all, and again there is a fascinating book on this
subject by Julian Barbour, The End of Time.Barbour goes into considerable detail from a physicist's
point of view (relativity, quantum theory etc.), but was deeply influenced by Leibniz in the elaboration
of his theory.

For what its' worth, however, I might give you an analogy of the kind of thing that Leibniz might have
used in illustration of his theory: a highly intuitive explanation. Movies are made up of frames, each of
which is one picture. In order for us to see this reel as a movie and be deluded into accepting it as
'flowing' in real time, it must be run at 24 frames per second. Accordingly each of the frames is 1/24th
second of time: a time capsule. Now take the reel and cut it up into all its single frames, then shuffle
them like a pack of cards. You now have (say) 10,000 stills, each of them a 'slice' of time in the
adventure that was, previously, a movie. You can pick up one frame and in a vague sort of way (by
memory) make an effort to recall where, roughly, it fitted into the sequence. But the point is, of
course, that no time is 'in' or 'flowing through' this picture. The picture just represents an instant,
1/24th second, of some story. So do all the others. Therefore the only way to look at each still in the
context of time is to say that each belongs somewhere in that whole story when contemplated as a
story: that each of these stills is, somehow, related to all the others by the idea of a sequence in
which, properly, they should be arranged. Now you understand from this that you could say the same
of the photos in your picture album. They too are stills from a life; and they too are related to an
underlying idea of sequence. But there is no 'object' which you might call time at their back — strictly
regarded, there is only the idea of sequence which relies on your memory to assure you that,
somehow, each can be placed in a particular order in relation to every other.

Now let's say that your photos, or the frames in the movie, were numbered so that you can put them
in their exact order. What have you achieved? The recreation of time? Hardly! Time does not begin to
'flow' just because you put the pics in order, does it? In fact, not even Kant's a priori experience of
time can be said to apply to this. Putting them in order is nothing other than correlatingthe pictures or
stills. And this, precisely is Leibniz's (and Barbour's) theory of time. That there is nothing like 'real'
time; it is just an order of succession which we, using a perceptual technique which evolution
bestowed on us, impose on this succession. Ultimately, for each moment that we live, our perception
does the same thing with the 'snapshots' of which our adventures are comprised: our brain interprets
these as a continuum, and hence we have the impression of a flow where in fact there is none. Real
life impressions are probably much faster than 1/24 second, but still finite. The impression of a time
flow is created by all these 'moments' being instantaneously sorted into memory slots. And now you
need nothing more than to acknowledge that all of us gradually lose that sense of time as our
memories age, that sooner or later our memory loses its hold on the exact sequence. And once you
realise this, you may come to acceptance that Leibniz and Barbour are probably right: for the more
our memories fade, the more these 'movies' become 'stills'. In memory the 'sense of time' disappears
and becomes a mere order of succession, which we remember as best we can. Where did time
disappear to?

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney