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A Modern Conception of Time1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

E. A. Milne
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Extract

I think that to Lord Kelvin is attributed the saying that the scientific attitude to a thing, if you can't do anything else with it, is to measure it. This is the attitude I propose to adopt towards Time. The situation is to some extent analogous to the situation with regard to electricity. Science is unable to say what electricity is, and so it almost denies the word any entrance into a treatise on the subject. It replaces it by the word charge, which is something that can be measured. It is important to avoid hypostatizing time into a thing-in-itself. Instead of trying to say what time is (e.g. Plato's description of it as “the moving image of eternity”) we try to find a way of measuring it.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 25 , Issue 92 , January 1950 , pp. 68 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1950

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References

1 Half-hour address, delivered to the Royal Institute of Philosophy at its Twenty-fourth Ordinary General Meeting, July 20, 1949. The original work on which this address is based was joint work by the author and Dr. G. J. Whitrow.