12 August

I’ve been trying to describe here how things like distances and times are not properties of the world. That we don’t live ‘in’ a space billions of light years wide, or in a universe billions of years old. Space and time and other measurements don’t describe the world. They’re not nouns. They’re verbs. They’re relationships between things. They change, with those relationships. The ‘coastline paradox’ might make this clearer. There is no such thing as THE length of a coastline. It changes with the method of measuring it, and not because some methods are more accurate than others. ‘Length’ is not a static property of the world.