Time

The interval between beginning and ending; measured duration.

Its measurement and the effect it has on many aspects of human activity, the days, the seasons, the years, is important to everyone. Some aspect of this subject has engaged human attention throughout history and probably throughout prehistory. We experience it in our daily existence, through the year, in the cycle of years, and throughout our whole lives. While sometimes we feel that time hangs heavily on our hands, that it passes slowly, and that yet it sometimes passes in a flash, we know rationally that it passes uniformly, at a steady pace. Our clocks and watches tell us so.

For many years, the government of the United Kingdom offered a handsome reward to whoever could build a reliable ship’s chronometer. To have such an instrument on board ship made navigation on the open seas possible, more reliably than by dead reckoning. The combination of chronometer and sextant enabled mariners to position themselves accurately in the middle of the ocean, while out of sight of land. That assumed both that the chronometer recorded the passage of time uniformly our shipboard measure of time and that the sun passed over the heavens uniformly our celestial measure of time.

We know intellectually that time proceeds steadily and in one direction; it never goes in reverse, nor does it jump ahead or jump back. There are no hiccups in time. Those are judgments that are based on our experience and on which we rely for the safe and dependable conduct of our lives. But the human imagination being what it is, we cannot help asking “What if . . .?” We do that at all sorts of levels, from the idle speculation, daydreaming, through science fiction, to the quasi-academic time societies, to the theoretical physicists exploring time reversal. Somewhere in that spectrum come the paranormal experiments with retrocognition and Precognition: the ability to recall things long gone happenings, people, and events from well before our time and the ability to foresee events yet to come.