After the Reluctant Universe: Dialogue II — On Time (and Why It Doesn’t Flow)

Characters:

Professor Quillibrace

Mr Blottisham

Miss Elowen Stray

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Blottisham:

I trust, at least, that time will behave itself. Space may be a disappointment, but time clearly passes.

Quillibrace:

It does not.

Elowen Stray:

Not at all?

Quillibrace:

Not in the way you mean.

Blottisham:

But things change! Causes precede effects! My tea grows cold!

Quillibrace:

Change occurs. Ordering occurs. Cooling occurs. None of that requires a river called time flowing past events.

Elowen Stray:

So time isn’t a thing moving things along?

Quillibrace:

No more than space is a box holding them.

Blottisham:

Then why do we speak of the “passage” of time?

Quillibrace:

Because sequence is easy to mistake for motion.

Elowen Stray:

So what is time, then?

Quillibrace:

A constraint on how distinctions can be actualised.

Blottisham:

That sounds evasive.

Quillibrace:

It is precise.

Elowen Stray:

You mean time orders relations the way space differentiates them?

Quillibrace:

Exactly. Temporal order is not movement, but consistency.

Blottisham:

Consistency of what?

Quillibrace:

Of change.

Elowen Stray:

So time keeps change from contradicting itself?

Quillibrace:

Very nicely put.

Blottisham:

But clocks measure time!

Quillibrace:

Clocks stabilise periodic change. They do not tap into a universal current.

Blottisham:

Then why do different clocks disagree? Relativity, dilation—

Quillibrace:

Because temporal ordering is relational, not absolute.

Elowen Stray:

So simultaneity failing isn’t time breaking…

Quillibrace:

…it is the refusal of time to become a thing.

Blottisham:

You make it sound deliberate.

Quillibrace:

Only if you insist on personifying constraints.

Elowen Stray:

Then what about the past and the future?

Quillibrace:

They are not locations. They are asymmetries in how relations stabilise.

Blottisham:

I remember the past.

Quillibrace:

Yes. Memory is a present phenomenon with a directional structure.

Elowen Stray:

And the future?

Quillibrace:

Is not waiting to arrive. It is open because constraints have not yet closed.

Blottisham:

This is intolerable. Without flowing time, how does anything happen?

Quillibrace:

Things do not happen in time.

They happen as time is actualised.

Elowen Stray:

So time isn’t the stage…

Quillibrace:

…it is the rule governing which scenes can coherently follow which.

Blottisham:

Then what of the beginning of time? The Big Bang?

Quillibrace:

A limit of temporal description, not the first tick of a cosmic clock.

Elowen Stray:

And the end of time?

Quillibrace:

A fantasy born of treating time as something that could run out.

Blottisham:

I feel profoundly cheated. I was promised a river.

Quillibrace:

You were given an ordering principle instead.

Elowen Stray:

And once we stop imagining time flowing…

Quillibrace:

…many paradoxes quietly dissolve.

Blottisham:

I fear what awaits us next.

Quillibrace:

Curvature.

(Blottisham groans. Elowen leans forward, alert now—not comforted, but intrigued.)