Talking About Time

TALKING ABOUT TIME

We are sitting on a veranda of an Indian bungalow on a hillside in Rajasthan and are discussing some philosophical questions. He is said to be a wizard, apparently capable of changing the status of our world, I am the head of the government so I have an interest in his capabilities.
‘Firstly,’ says the wizard, who is a man of indeterminate age, maybe eighty or ninety but still active and with an gleam in his eyes, ‘do you accept that I’m a wizard. I can do things that are beyond your imaginings.’
‘I do accept that,’ I say, ‘or at least I accept that you may be able to seem to do things which are beyond imaginings.’
‘What do you mean,’ he says. ‘You think that I can do things which will not actually happen but that I’ve sort of hypnotised you.’
‘That’s what’s in my mind,’ I say.
‘So how can we start?’ he asks.’
‘Let’s look at time,’ I say, and I extend my left arm and pointed at my wrist watch.
‘But surely, if I stop your watch,’ says wizard, ‘that doesn’t mean that time has stopped, it just means I have stopped your watch.’ He reaches out a hand and snaps his fingers and the second hand of my watch stops clicking its way round the dial. ‘Do you think I’ve stopped your watch, or that you think I’ve stopped it, and really its still going?’
I look around me. There’s a bird with colourful plumage hopping about on the lawn, pecking at small invisible items of food. Above us strands of cloud still march cross the heavens in the jetstream. If I was capable of perceiving it, I think I’d be able to see the sun lowering towards the western horizon.
‘I think you’ve stopped my watch,’ I say, in agreement.
‘Have we taken a step at all towards stopping time then?’ says the wizard. ‘I don’t wear a watch myself, but there’s a grandfather clock in the room, just in there.’ He nods towards the open doorway. I look into the dimness and screw up my eyes. I can’t actually tell whether the grandfather clock has stopped or not, there’s no second hand, but it seems likely.
‘Alright, I’ll accept that you can stop clocks, but what does that prove? I should think if I practiced a bit I could stop clocks as well.’ I’m not a wizard myself, but I know a few spells.
‘You want to see something better?’ he says. “There are a few satellites up there, providing time settings. They say they’re pretty important. I could stop the time on them and you might hear some of the results. How about that?’
I’m beginning to get into the swing of things, and so I nod, saying, ‘why not, now we’re really getting into it?’
And so the wizards points skyward and mutters something under his breath. In his garden nothing seems to be different, but I hear the concussion of vehicles hitting each other in the distance.
‘I think it affects aircraft as well,’ he says. ‘But we’ll hope that none crash near us.’
‘Why are you doing this now?’ I ask. ‘Even though I head the government I’m not that important surely. I’m just bit of a sceptic. I appreciate that you wizards can do more stuff than we ordinary people can, but why now?’
‘So, you think that it’s really happening then?’ says the wizard, and I have to admit that he might be right. ‘But you’ve not actually stopped time,’ I say. You’ve stopped things that measure time. You could stop all the clocks in the world, but what would that mean? You would have just stopped the devices which we use to measure the passing of time.’
The wizard smiles. ‘You’re right of course, we measure the passing of time in accordance with the revolutions of the world. One revolution can be divided into smaller units, because after all we’d be limited in our ability to make arrangements to meet, to eat and do all the things which we do, dare I say it, every day.’
‘So you’ve got to stop the earth rotating then,’ I say with a certain degree of scepticism.
‘You want me to do that?’ questions the wizard.
‘Why would you bother,’ I answer, ‘and surely if you do we’re all going to fly off into space.’
‘If I can stop the world, don’t tell me that I have no control over what happens on the surface then.’ The wizard smiles in a way that chills me slightly.
‘Watch this,’ says the wizard. and he extends his arms palms down, closes his eyes and shouts out some sort of incantation. There are almost imperceptible changes to our surroundings and I realise that I can tell that the sun is no longer descending towards the horizon, but that the clouds in the jetstream are still on the move.
‘We’re getting there now,’ says the wizard, and there are almost continuous sounds of metal being crushed and impacted in the distance.
‘It makes no difference,’ I say, just a bit recklessly, ‘although the measuring devices, and what we use as a base for measuring it are no longer in play, time is still happening. We’re still talking. The bird out there is still pecking away, it’s just that the measuring devices and the pretty arbitrary basis for the measurement are no longer available. Look at that, the bird is pecking away pretty regularly. We could use that as a measurement. Sixty pecks to a peckage. Sixty peckages to a beak, sixty beaks to a bird, twenty-four birds to a flock. And you can stop the lot, but if you and I are still talking, time is passing and we only lack the means of measurement.’
‘You’re right,’ exclaims the wizard and points at me…

THE END