The Notion That Time Is 'Stretched Out' Like Space Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 127-8):

… the concept of a unified spacetime 'continuum' implies that time is 'stretched out' in its entirety, like space. No absolute and universal meaning can be attached to the notion of 'the' present. Furthermore, the idea that time 'flows', or that the present moment somehow moves from the past to the future in time, has no place in the physicist's description of the world. This state of affairs was neatly summed up by the German physicist Hermann Weyl, who declared that 'The world does not happen, it simply is.'

Blogger Comments:

Taking the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory on the General Theory of Relativity, time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes. On this basis, time is not 'stretched out in its entirety like space' because there is no time dimension for processes that have not yet unfolded.

From the same perspective, the present time is the time of the unfolding of the process of making meaning, sensing or saying. As such, the present is a point of reference defined by the process of making meaning.

In this view, the idea that time 'flows' — which is voiced by physicists continually — confuses the unfolding of processes (flow) with the dimension along which the unfolding is measured (time).

Given the above, the world does 'happen' — just as Weyl's declaration 'happened' — and since motions are happenings, physical models of the motions of bodies, such as quantum mechanics, are models of happenings.

The notion that all is 'being' is a perspective that naturally arises from viewing phenomena through the lens of mathematics, since the mathematical equation is a construal of experience as being: an identity relation between phenomena.