i saw this ...

... and for one very brief moment it made me think about the relationship between the metrics and the substance and/or between the tools and the material. Some time ago I thought that all diagnostic tests are a wash because they are always going to give you the same thing no matter what you apply them to. They measure what we want them to measure and not what maybe should be measured but we haven't think of it yet. Simply put, clocks are the reflection of our view of the world. Not of the world itself.

Comments

[adam]

i sort of agree...

well, i disagree with the graff and agree with your statement about diagnostic tests.

i don't think it's fair to say that time doesn't exist.... because the sun sets and the moon rises and things do in fact get older.

rather i think it's fair to suppose that time doesn't necessarily exist in the manner in which clocks attempt to describe it.

on the other hand, i do agree with the flaw in metrics and diagnostics. i had a huge problem when working a large TV company. i couldn't understand the dependency on ratings data when there was no secondary source to even remotely confirm the validity of the results. it was as if some mystical machine was spitting out numbers in a vacuum, and we just assumed that no matter what the number, it was correct and useful.

i'm not one to condone blind faith...

but this seems like a scary instance of it in a realm far removed from the ethico-religious world.

[Ana Andjelic]

hey, yes -- good comment. But it's tricky when you start thinking like that about time, because time is human invention as much as it is its metrics, and in fact it's really hard to separate the two.

yes, there are processes but they are not linear or predictable or uniform. Jjust think about your own examples: aging happens in a discontinuous, non-linear, individual pattern -- and its actually better described as a characteristic of a complex system rather than a uni-dimensional feature.

(and the sun sets because Earth is spinning around, nothing to do with time ;)

So it's not even about the clocks - which are a mere tools - but about the RATIONAL mode of thinking that already got us in a ton of trouble with its misleading assumptions. I bet that if we came up with the unified theory of everything earlier, there would be a completely different concept of time.