The notion of time

This is a much too brief place to discuss the full history and meaning of the notion of time. This post will progressively fill up...with time.

The first idea that I would like to start with is the fact that time, in terms of the dynamical evolution of the objects and systems which surround us, has not always been an obvious concept in the History. A surprising example is the static view of the world that the Greeks had. Heracles may have been the only one at his time to notice that "you do not always cross the same river", that things are changing and are not immutable.

More generally, the Greeks thought the world was in balance. As Ludwig von Bertalanffy notices, "Greek physics did not contain a time dimension" (General System Theory, Chapter 10). That is why, among other things, the Greeks spent so much time on geometry.

The question that I would like to ask is if the notion of time was absent only from the teachings and the work of the scholars only or if it was generally absent from the psyche of people. On one hand, it is hard to imagine that anybody could not have noticed that objects can fall, things got unbalanced and stones have trajectories. Should apes notice that the world is constantly changing? Or did the humans have to learn such concept which appears so "obvious" to us?

If you see an ape or an ancient Greek, don't hesitate to ask him.

To be continued.