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Letter: Time is just a construct, so its advent is fairly recent

Published 19 March 2025

From Julian Higman, Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK

In a way, the question “When did time begin?” is a non-question. Time is our manufactured, mental measuring stick, expressed as a word, to gauge and so compare motion. In this sense, it will have begun sometime after we started to use speech, between two other questions you posed: “When did Homo sapiens originate?” and “When did civilisation arise(22 February, p 31)?”

Issue no. 3535 published 22 March 2025

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