Time phil 101

What are clocks?

Physicals objects that exhibits a regular period of time

What are artificial clocks?

Timekeeping devices designed to measure and indicate time using numbers (i.e., grandfather clocks and wristwatches)

What are natural clocks?

Clocks that show time by using natural resources (i.e., sundial clocks)

What are biological clocks?

Clocks that occur within the human body (i.e., heartbeats and circadian rhythm)

What is the best physical clock?

The strontium atomic clock

Which clock defines what we call a “second”?

The cesium clock

What is psychological time?

The time we feel pass by, our inner clock

Manifest image of time

Our experience of time 

Physicists’ time

Known as ‘T,’ no difference between past, present, or future

Explanatory gap

The difference between what we experience and what we discover in science

A-theory of time

The idea that time is objective; the idea that the past was real, the present is real, but the future is not real

B-theory of time

The idea that time is based on individual perspectives, it is subjective; all moments in time are real, no matter if they were in the past, in the present, or in the future

Presentism

A-theory, the idea that only the present moment exists

Four-dimensionalism

The idea that objects in space have different stages in a specific moment

Temporal metaphysics

Determining which moments of time exists

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

A book that supports B-theory

Eternalism/block universe theory

Past, present, and future objects are all equally real; the universe is in a block, everything happens within this block

Growing block theory

Past and present objects exist, but the future ones do not

Shrinking block theory

Present and future objects exists, but the past no longer does