What is time?

Note that the date is changed!  The meeting on Feb. 26 was cancelled due to my reaction to the second shot of Covid virus vaccine.  I'm better now, so we can pick this topic up again.  March 12!  7:00.   

It has been a little while since we have tackled a classically philosophic topic.  While "What is Time?" is not exactly a "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" quality topic, it can be a little esoteric and hard to "get into" for many people.  Hopefully my introduction here will help.

 "What is time?  If nobody asks me, I know; but if I desired to explain it to anyone who should ask me, then plainly I know not."  St. Augustine

 Time is usually broken down into 3 general categories: things in the past, things in the future, and the miniscule moment that separates them.  We like to think that this beautiful, fleeting moment we live in as being a moving, flowing snippet of time with essentially zero duration since the past follows so quickly after it, and the future is yet to be.  A razor's edge, is how I like to describe it. 

 Science measures the passage of very small durations of time by using the vibration of molecules, and large amounts of time by using the speed of light as a reference.  The human mind can perceive time only in what I would call practical terms, limited by the speed we take in perceptional information and processes it in our minds.  In that context the speed of thought might actually be very slow. 

 One metric I have always liked is that our minds can stitch together images into a flowing, coherent pattern if the images change at a rate of 22 frames per second or higher.  In the old days of movie film, if the film projection slowed to below 22 FPS, the images would appear to the audience to be jumpy and disconnected on the screen.  Typically films would be made at 30 FPS, avoiding this problem.  If that 22 FPS rate is true, then maybe the speed of thought is 1/22nd of a second?  Cognitive science measures the speed of neuron synapse info transfer at a much higher rate, so let's table this for now and maybe come back at it from another angle in a separate BQ.

 We normally see causal events in a common sense sort of way, where something happens and events follow due to this initial event.  A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples on the surface.  We understand this process because we are looking backwards, into the past, and we infer the movement of time from the motions we see. 

 But what if time is not moving, and we only infer the motion because of this perceptional frame of reference.  What if we take out the idea that the "present moment" is special in any way, but rather is just one of an infinite number of frames of reference we can perceive at any one time.  If we take motion out of the process, can we create a description of time that does not move?  Philosophers with way too much time on their hands have done this by suggesting that space-time might be composes of individual frames, each of infinitesimally small in duration, but connected much like the 2-dimensional frames on a movie strip.  These frames, they say, are actually 4-dimensional blocks.  They are composed of the 3-dimensional universe plus a 4th dimension of time.

 Ok, admittedly this is getting a little strange to think about.  If these block frames exist, and they include the past and the future, does that mean the universe is already set?  It leads us back towards issues of Free Will and predestination.  As always, things seem to be interconnected.

 My suggestion is to give this topic a good start, and let's see where it goes.  Are there movies you've seen that play with time as a plot theme?  Interstellar comes to mind for me, but time in that movie is handled by Einstein's special relativity, for the most part.  Time travelling stories often deal with time manipulation.  What comes to your mind?  How about The Lake House starring Sandra Bullock and Kenau Reeves.