"Time is a child playing with dice; the kingdom belongs to a child." — Heraclitus

The Child’s Question: “What is time?”

Time is what makes bedtime different from playtime. It’s what makes your ice cream melt, your birthday come closer, and your toys feel old. It’s the invisible river that moves everything, even when you sit still.

But try to catch it—and it slips through your fingers.

The Clock and the Calendar

As we grow, time becomes more... mechanical. Seconds tick, alarms ring, days pass. We learn to fear Mondays and long for Fridays. But these are human tools—clocks don’t measure time, they measure motion. And calendars don’t know the future—they mark it, like gravestones for moments we haven't yet lived.

Newton’s Time vs Einstein’s Time

Newton thought time was absolute—a godlike constant, marching on no matter what.

Isaac Newton founded classical mechanics on the view that space is distinct from body and that time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world. For this reason he spoke of absolute space and absolute time, so as to distinguish these entities from the various ways by which we measure them (which he called relative spaces and relative times). From antiquity into the eighteenth century, contrary views which denied that space and time are real entities maintained that the world is necessarily a material plenum. Credit: Standford Encl. ,Wikipedia Ref

Then came Einstein, who said: Not so fast.

He showed us that time bends, stretches, and slows. Near the speed of light, a second becomes an eternity. Time is relative to motion, to gravity, to you. (Time dilation) Einstein's Theory of Time

Two twins—one flies near a black hole, one stays home. They reunite, and one has aged less. Time is not a straight line. It's a tangled, curved fabric we call spacetime. Your heartbeat, your aging, your dying—woven into it.

Quantum Time: Welcome to the Mind-Breaker Zone

In the quantum world, particles don’t care about your clocks. They can be entangled across time and space. Cause and effect? Optional. Events might be simultaneous, or in reverse. Newtonian Mechanics don't work either.

At the Planck scale—time may not even exist. Some quantum physicists (e.g. Don Page and William Wootters) have developed a theory that time is actually an emergent phenomenon resulting from a strange quantum concept known as entanglement, in which different quantum particles effectively share an existence, even though physically separated, so that the quantum state of each particle can only be described relative to the other entangled particles.

There’s research (e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s "Loop Quantum Gravity") where time is not fundamental. Instead, change is primary. Time is just a way of describing relationships between changes.

Biological Time: Your Body as a Clock

Your cells don’t run on clocks—they run on rhythms. Circadian rhythms. Hormonal cycles. Memory is a biological form of time: the past encoded in neurons.

So yes, you are made of time. You are memory and decay. You are the countdown from birth to death.

Metaphysics and Time: Where Words Break

Here, we approach the edge where science meets silence.

In religion, God often exists outside time—eternal, changeless. But evil? Evil is rooted in events, in moments. Without time, there's no sin, no suffering, no redemption. So how can God be timeless and yet care about what happens?

This is the paradox of eternity intervening in the temporal.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, time is cyclical—Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time. Creation, preservation, destruction—repeating endlessly. In the Bible, “a thousand years are like a day to God.” And in Islam, the Day of Judgment collapses time into a single eternal reckoning.

Eternity is not infinite time. It's timelessness—and the human brain is not built to hold it.

We don’t experience time—we experience change.

But change hurts. People leave. Bodies age. Empires fall.

We grieve because time flows. And we love because it does. To love is to say, “Even though this will end, I will still give myself to it.”

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings)

And so, time is our greatest enemy—and our only stage.

We don’t experience time—we experience change.

But change hurts. People leave. Bodies age. Empires fall.

We grieve because time flows. And we love because it does. To love is to say, “Even though this will end, I will still give myself to it.”

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — Gandalf (Tolkien)

And so, time is our greatest enemy—and our only stage.

The God of the Gaps... or the Clockmaker in the Mirror?

Maybe time is a script, and we are actors. Maybe it’s chaos, and we are dancers.

But here’s the kicker: without memory, time doesn’t exist.

So perhaps time is not something out there at all. Perhaps it is within us—a measure not of the universe, but of consciousness itself.

That would mean: to be aware is to create time.

And in that case…You are the clock.

"Time is a child playing with dice; the kingdom belongs to a child." — Heraclitus

The Child’s Question: “What is time?”

Time is what makes bedtime different from playtime. It’s what makes your ice cream melt, your birthday come closer, and your toys feel old. It’s the invisible river that moves everything, even when you sit still.

But try to catch it—and it slips through your fingers.

The Clock and the Calendar

As we grow, time becomes more... mechanical. Seconds tick, alarms ring, days pass. We learn to fear Mondays and long for Fridays. But these are human tools—clocks don’t measure time, they measure motion. And calendars don’t know the future—they mark it, like gravestones for moments we haven't yet lived.

Newton’s Time vs Einstein’s Time

Newton thought time was absolute—a godlike constant, marching on no matter what.

Isaac Newton founded classical mechanics on the view that space is distinct from body and that time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world. For this reason he spoke of absolute space and absolute time, so as to distinguish these entities from the various ways by which we measure them (which he called relative spaces and relative times). From antiquity into the eighteenth century, contrary views which denied that space and time are real entities maintained that the world is necessarily a material plenum. Credit: Standford Encl. ,Wikipedia Ref

Then came Einstein, who said: Not so fast.

He showed us that time bends, stretches, and slows. Near the speed of light, a second becomes an eternity. Time is relative to motion, to gravity, to you. (Time dilation) Einstein's Theory of Time

Two twins—one flies near a black hole, one stays home. They reunite, and one has aged less. Time is not a straight line. It's a tangled, curved fabric we call spacetime. Your heartbeat, your aging, your dying—woven into it.

Quantum Time: Welcome to the Mind-Breaker Zone

In the quantum world, particles don’t care about your clocks. They can be entangled across time and space. Cause and effect? Optional. Events might be simultaneous, or in reverse. Newtonian Mechanics don't work either.

At the Planck scale—time may not even exist. Some quantum physicists (e.g. Don Page and William Wootters) have developed a theory that time is actually an emergent phenomenon resulting from a strange quantum concept known as entanglement, in which different quantum particles effectively share an existence, even though physically separated, so that the quantum state of each particle can only be described relative to the other entangled particles.

There’s research (e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s "Loop Quantum Gravity") where time is not fundamental. Instead, change is primary. Time is just a way of describing relationships between changes.

Biological Time: Your Body as a Clock

Your cells don’t run on clocks—they run on rhythms. Circadian rhythms. Hormonal cycles. Memory is a biological form of time: the past encoded in neurons.

So yes, you are made of time. You are memory and decay. You are the countdown from birth to death.

Metaphysics and Time: Where Words Break

Here, we approach the edge where science meets silence.

In religion, God often exists outside time—eternal, changeless. But evil? Evil is rooted in events, in moments. Without time, there's no sin, no suffering, no redemption. So how can God be timeless and yet care about what happens?

This is the paradox of eternity intervening in the temporal.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, time is cyclical—Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time. Creation, preservation, destruction—repeating endlessly. In the Bible, “a thousand years are like a day to God.” And in Islam, the Day of Judgment collapses time into a single eternal reckoning.

Eternity is not infinite time. It's timelessness—and the human brain is not built to hold it.

We don’t experience time—we experience change.

But change hurts. People leave. Bodies age. Empires fall.

We grieve because time flows. And we love because it does. To love is to say, “Even though this will end, I will still give myself to it.”

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings)

And so, time is our greatest enemy—and our only stage.

We don’t experience time—we experience change.

But change hurts. People leave. Bodies age. Empires fall.

We grieve because time flows. And we love because it does. To love is to say, “Even though this will end, I will still give myself to it.”

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — Gandalf (Tolkien)

And so, time is our greatest enemy—and our only stage.

The God of the Gaps... or the Clockmaker in the Mirror?

Maybe time is a script, and we are actors. Maybe it’s chaos, and we are dancers.

But here’s the kicker: without memory, time doesn’t exist.

So perhaps time is not something out there at all. Perhaps it is within us—a measure not of the universe, but of consciousness itself.

That would mean: to be aware is to create time.

And in that case…You are the clock.