"The Flow Of Time" Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Gribbin (1990: 183):

Physicists often use a simple device to represent the movement of particles through space and time on a piece of paper or on a blackboard.  The idea is simply to represent the flow of time by the direction up the page, from bottom to top, and motion in space across the page.

Blogger Comment:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the notion of particles moving through time can be seen as a category error, mistaking Extent for Location: motion.  To explain, in the case of space, there is the distinction between

• Location (motion): the object moved from A to B, and
• Extent (distance): the object moved three metres.

However, in the case of time, although the grammar provides the same distinction

• Location (motion): the object moved from from noon to 1pm and
• Extent (duration): the object moved for one hour

both renderings actually construe the Extent (duration) of the object's motion.  There is no distinct traversal of the dimension of time, analogous to the traversal of any of the three dimensions of space.

The notion of a 'flow of time' — derived from (an interpretation of) the Second Law of Thermodynamics — also involves a category error, mistaking the unfolding of processes (flow) for the dimension along which processes unfold (time).  Physics treats time as a dimension just like space, but there is no 'flow of space'.