A Rational Cosmology: Time as an Absolute Quality

Essay XXII

This is Essay XXII of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

We have previously seen that a time scale, to have any purpose or meaning, must by definition be uniform. A year is a year is a year, no matter what happens to any particular entity during that year.

Therefore, though time is a ubiquitous quality of particular entities, it is not a quality that depends on the fluctuations of other such ubiquitous qualities. The measurement of the quality, "time," within an entity, i.e. that entity's age, continues to increase so long as the entity has some measure of the other ubiquitous qualities.

That is, just so long as a given entity has some quantity of mass, volume, and the three spatial dimensions, it will exhibit the quality, "time." But the degree to which it exhibits time, its age, does not vary in accordance with the quantitative fluctuations of any other qualities, even ubiquitous ones, the entity has. Each existing entity accumulates age in the same manner and at the same rate (rate itself being a function of time). This insight can be concisely phrased for future word economy: time is an absolute quality.

Let us assume, for a moment, that the contrary notion, that of relative time, were to be employed. By relative time, we shall describe the idea that the accumulation of the quality, "time," varies from entity to entity.

The form of the scenario on which the theory of relative time inherently relies can be expressed thus: We begin our observation of entity A and entity B simultaneously. During the period of observation, while entity A has accumulated X units of time, it is possible for entity B to have accumulated Y units of time, where Y does not equal X.