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I'm confused why they spent so much time on the idiom of "flowing" time. It doesn't literally feel like it's "flowing", that's just a figure of speech, a metaph

I'm confused why they spent so much time on the idiom of "flowing" time. It doesn't literally feel like it's "flowing", that's just a figure of speech, a metaphor for the fact that in daily life we don't have control over its direction. While the implications and meaning of time in a cosmological sense are certainly interesting, the piece's angle of debunking naive common-sense views of time is a bit too aggressive. In daily life, the common-sense view of time is perfectly rational. Perhaps the audience is physics grad students, I dunno.

coldtea 12y ago
>It doesn't literally feel like it's "flowing", that's just a figure of speech, a metaphor for the fact that in daily life we don't have control over its direction. Huh? The flow of time, and "time passing" is the most universal and common understanding (and feeling) of time.
- skywhopper 12y ago
  Yes, these are common metaphors. They do not describe the actual perceptual experience of the passage of time. To get hung up on what metaphors people use to describe something utterly intangible is silly.