Introduction and JG Whitrow- What is Time?

During the first class, I really enjoyed the music video we watched "Come Into My World" by Kylie Minoque.  The inability to pick up on certain aspects of the repetition in the video were amazing.  We were able to compose a list of similarities after one viewing, and then another list, completely different, after the second time we watched the video.  Knowing what we were looking for, rather than nonchalantly watching the video, proved to help our eyes follow exactly what was happening, and see more of the parallels as the video progressed.  Similarly, in the second class, we watched another music video.  This video similarly was able to play tricks on my eyes at first glance.  The ability of the director to tell a story, not only through the words in the story, but also by changing the direction at which certain aspects of the video were playing, forward vs backward, were amazing.  Personally, I was fooled by this aspect of the video, in that I thought the black cat was going against the grain and walking backwards through the "forward side" of the screen.  Until we watched the video in slow motion did my eyes recognize that the cat was true to form, and was walking forwards. The ability of the visual tactics used to trick you unless you paid close attention was amazing.  Thinking about the screenplay of the video and replaying it in our own pictures and words, helped to organize the thoughts everyone seemed to have about the video.

"...Only time has this peculiar quality which makes us feel intuitively that we understand it perfectly so long as we are not asked to explain what we mean by it."
Whitrow begins his piece by discussing why we ultimately cannot seem to answer the question as to why we can not explain time.  First, he looks at the origins of time, whether it be with the Gregorian calendar, the Mayan calendar, the Christian calendar, and contributions by such groups as the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians.   The Mayans were "the most obsessed with the idea of time...picturing the divisions time as burdens carried by a hierarchy of divine bearers who personified the respective numbers by which the different periods- days, months, years decades and centuries- were distinguished."  Though we recognize that the Mayans were able to break ground on the though of time, we know that our sense of time now, is much more sophisticated.  Our ability to acknowledge and understand the idea of past, present and future is only a trait that man has been able to comprehend, differing from even the "most intelligent animals such as chimpanzees."  Once we are able to decipher between past and present, we can start to examine events in the past, such as the beginning of time, time that we consider today and also the start of everything we know.
Personally, I have never thought about the idea of explaining time.  It is a hard concept to ponder, because it is something that we know, but can't comprehend.  If someone asks me what is time, I would, after reading this article, think about time on many different levels, rather than the "time" on the clock.