Time and the structure of human cognition
pp. 314-324
in: Fraser, Nathaniel Lawrence (eds), The study of time II, Berlin, Springer, 1975Abstract
Occasionally, it hits me how marvelous a creature Man is. Among all his numerous talents, the one that fascinates me most is his ability to create abstract notions out of something which he does not really understand. The emergence of the abstract notion of time is obviously the case in point. No one, apparently, can claim to know what time is. Nevertheless, there is this brave breed of people called physicists, who used this elusive notion as one of the basic building blocks of their theory, and miraculously, the theory worked. When one of the leading figures of the clan, by the name of Albert Einstein, quietly mumbled his secret incantation which sounded like "Combine time with space in such a way that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then mass is equal to energy," lo and behold, atoms exploded ever so noisily.
