Time

   The Contradiction Between Physical Time and Psychological Time

   In appropriating time for themselves, and abstracting it into a stark mathematical parameter, physicists have robbed it of much of its original, human, content. The physicist will usually say, "Ours is the real time-and all that there really is. The richness of human psychological time derives entirely from subjective factors and is unrelated to the intrinsic qualities of real, physical time"-and then go about his or her work and daily life immersed in the complexities of human time like everyone else.

   Should we simply shrug the human experience of time aside as a matter solely for psychologists? Does the time of an altered state of conciousness have no relevance at all to the time of Newton or Einstein? Does our impression of the flow of time, or the division of time into past, present and future, tell us nothing at all about how time is as opposed to how it merely appears to us muddle-headed humans?

   As a physicist, I am well aware how much intuition can lead us astray. As I remarked earlier, intuition suggests that the sun moves around the earth. Yet, as a human being, I find it impossible to relinquish the sensation of a flowing time and a moving present moment. It is something so basic to my experience of the world that I am repelled by the claim that it is only an illusion or misperception. It seems to me there is an aspect of time of great significance that we have so far overlooked in our description of the physical universe. (Davies, 1995, p. 275)