The Ancient Greeks actually had a far deeper insight into the meaning of time, space and motion than the moderns. Not only Heraclitus, the greatest dialectician of Antiquity, but also the Eleatic philosophers (Parmenides, Zeno) arrived at a very scientific conception of these phenomena. The Greek atomists already put forward the picture of a universe which required no Creator, no beginning and no end. Space and matter are generally seen as opposites, as conveyed by the idea of “full” and “empty”. In practice, however, the one cannot exist without the other. They presuppose each other, determine, limit and define each other. The unity of space and matter is the most fundamental unity of opposites of all. This was already understood by the Greek atomists who visualised the universe as being composed of only two things – the “atoms” and the “void”. In essence, this view of the universe is correct.

Relativism has been observed many times in the history of philosophy. The sophists held that “man is the measure of all things”. They were relativists par excellence. Denying the possibility of absolute truth, they inclined towards extreme subjectivism. The sophists nowadays have a bad name, but in fact they represented a step forward in the history of philosophy. While there were many charlatans in their ranks, they also had a number of talented dialecticians like Protagoras. The dialectic of sophism was based on the correct idea that truth is many sided. A thing can be shown to have many properties. It is necessary to have the ability to see a given phenomenon from different sides. For the undialectical thinker, the world is a very simple place, made up of things existing separately, one after the other. Every “thing” enjoys a solid existence in time and space. It is before me “here” and “now”. However, closer observation reveals these simple and familiar words to be one-sided abstractions.

Aristotle as in so many other fields, dealt with space, time and motion with great rigour and profundity. He wrote that only two things are imperishable: time and change, which he rightly considers identical:

“It is impossible, however, that motion should be generable or perishable; it must always have existed. Nor can time come into being or cease to be; for there cannot be a ‘before’ or ‘after’ where there is no time. Movement, then, is also continuous in the sense in which time is, for time is either the same thing as motion or an attribute of it; so than motion must be continuous as time is, and if so it must be local and circular.” Elsewhere he says that “Movement can neither come into being nor cease to be: nor can time come into being, or cease to be.”[30]

How much wiser were the great thinkers of the Ancient World than those who now write about “the beginning of time”, and without even smiling!

The German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant was the man who, after Aristotle, investigated the question of the nature of time and space most fully, although his solutions were ultimately unsatisfactory. Every material thing is an assemblage of many properties. If we take away all these concrete properties, we are left with only two abstractions: time and space. The idea of time and space as really existing metaphysical entities was given a philosophical basis by Kant, who claimed that space and time were “phenomenally real”, but could not be known “in themselves”.

Time and space are properties of matter, and cannot be conceived separately from matter. In his book The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that time and space were not objective concepts drawn from observation of the real world, but were somehow inborn. In point of fact, all the concepts of geometry are derived from observations of material objects. One of the achievements of Einstein’s general theory of relativity was precisely to develop geometry as an empirical science, the axioms of which are inferred from actual measurements, and which differ from the axioms of classical Euclidean geometry, which were (incorrectly) supposed to have been the products of pure reason, deduced from logic alone.

Kant attempted to justify his claims in the famous section in his Critique of Pure Reason known as the Antinomies, which deal with the contradictory phenomena of the natural world, including space and time. The first four of Kant’s (cosmological) antinomies deal with this question. Kant had the merit of posing the existence of such contradictions, but his explanation was at best incomplete. It fell to the great dialectician Hegel to resolve the contradiction in Science of Logic.

Throughout the 18th century, science was dominated by the theories of classical mechanics, and one man set his stamp on the whole epoch. The poet Alexander Pope sums up the adulatory attitude of contemporaries to Newton in his verse:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

Newton envisaged time as flowing in a straight line everywhere. Even if there was no matter, there would be a fixed frame of space and time would still flow “through” it. Newton’s absolute spatial frame was supposed to be filled with a hypothetical “ether” through which light waves flowed. Newton thought that time was like a gigantic “container” inside which everything exists and changes. In this idea, time is conceived as having an existence separate and apart from the natural universe. Time would exist, even if the universe did not. This is characteristic of the mechanical (and idealist) method in which time, space, matter and motion are regarded as absolutely separate. In reality, it is impossible to separate them.

Newtonian physics was conditioned by mechanics which In the 18th century was the most advanced of the sciences. It was also convenient for the new ruling class because it presented an essentially static, timeless, unchanging view of the universe, in which all contradictions were smoothed out – no sudden leaps, no revolutions, but a perfect harmony, in which everything sooner or later returned to equilibrium, just as the British parliament had reached a satisfactory equilibrium with the Monarchy under William of Orange. The 20th century has pitilessly destroyed this view of the world. One after the other, the old rigid, static mechanism has been displaced. The new science has been characterised by restless change, fantastic speed, contradictions and paradoxes at all levels.

Newton distinguished between absolute time and “relative, apparent and common time”, as it appears in earthly clocks. He advanced the notion of absolute time, an ideal time scale which simplified the laws of mechanics. These abstractions of time and space proved to be powerful ideas that have greatly advanced our understanding of the universe. They were held to be absolute for a long time. However, upon closer examination, the “absolute truths” of classical Newtonian mechanics proved to be – relative. They were true only within certain limits.

  1. Aristotle, op cit., pp. 342 and 1b.