Disentangling our confusion of Time and History.

At the behest of a good friend, I'm reading Stephen Hawking's last book, "Brief Answers To The Big Questions." My friend especially enjoyed Hawking's cogency and demeanor in his writing as he got into big ideas without resorting to his native jargon of science; he did the extra work and it payed off.

While one of his big questions is pertinently theological, "does God exist", what spurs this essay stems from his question, "will we survive on earth?" He begins this chapter by invoking "the doom's day clock"and it's history, as well as his book that made him famous, "A Brief History of Time...

And than it struck me: History is not identical with Time.

Yet, we've fused these two concepts together, especially when we address the "irreversability" quality of reality that's usually attributed to the "second law" and goes by the name "entropy". (Set a head of cabbage on your counter top and you'll watch it move to a state of rot but never the other way around.)

Here's my attempt to un-confuse time and history via the thought-experiment below.

Imagine yourself sitting alone in a small cubicle, walls of beige bereft of pictures, no devices except for this: a vintage clock with a second hand that continuously spins around its 60 second lap. The movement of that second hand is rightly time. What's missing in this situation--at least it's minimized--is history.

This situation neither minimizes nor maximizes time. (Space remains changeless.) What is minimized is history. Basically, after an hour of sitting you will have the history of your heart beats, breaths, and thoughts.

Now, take a "day in the life of"-- a city. Instead of sitting alone in a sterile cubicle you stand on a corner of a bustling street-scape. In this case, time is the same in either situation; what changes is "history". Or at least its amount: you can easily imagine the throngs of people each being uniquely historical while sharing the same time and same space .

More, while you are engaged in your history of observing this hour of history, you could change your vantage point by crossing the street or by running down the same side of the street to its opposite corner. What you can't do however, is re-do these moves; the best you could do is to retrace your steps. This irreversability has to do with history--not time.

All time is, I would offer, is the analog of sweeping second hand found on the clocks and wrist watches of yore. That we now use digital clocks and watches is history.

Time remaining equal, what can change is the amount of history within a given time.