Ludwig Wittgenstein brings us back to the basics of time. He doesn’t buy into the idea of time being some mysterious cosmic force—it’s all about measurement. Think about it: clocks, calendars, stopwatches—they don’t capture “time” itself. Instead, they’re tools we’ve created to track movement and change. Without something to measure, time is just… an idea.

Imagine this: your fitness tracker buzzes to tell you you’ve walked 5,000 steps. Did it capture time? Nope, it recorded a sequence of movements—how long your legs kept going and when they stopped. Wittgenstein’s insight is sharp and a bit provocative: time doesn’t exist as an independent thing—it’s just the framework we use to make sense of life’s endless flow of events.

Now, here’s a fun bit about Wittgenstein: the man was so obsessed with clarity that he’d rewrite the same paragraph for years. His life’s work wasn’t about answers; it was about challenging assumptions, and this idea about time forces us to rethink what we’re measuring when we stare at the clock.

philosopher,science,