14 Dec 2012
[An unpublished letter to my hometown newspaper.]
The world is all a-twitter today with a question posed to
scientists by non-scientist Alan Alda. The question is: What is
time? Please be able to explain it to an 11 year old.
What is time? How clever is that?
How dumb is
that!!
In the first place, the answer to the question was given by
Aristotle in his work Physics more than 2300 years ago.
In the second place, the question is not answerable by
science, because “what is time?” is a philosophical question, not a scientific
one.
It is the nature of the departmental sciences that they
assume the existence of the things they need to begin. A scientist can
measure length just as he can measure time, but a scientist qua
scientist cannot say what length is. A scientist qua
scientist can use time and he can measure time, but he never asks himself what
time is. Such questions are philosophical, not scientific.
-30-
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