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Measuring time increases the entropy in the universe

Life has become so absurd that it seems necessary to seek some kind of explanation, even if partially satisfactory, to try to understand this significant and undeniable growth of chaos, and not of a chaos that anticipates a new creation, but of a chaos that anticipates destruction. According to a new experiment, the reason could be the measurement of time.

The study, recently released by Dr. Natalia Ares and her colleagues at the University of Oxford, indicates that the more precision is used to measure time, the more entropy (that is, disorder) is generated.

In other words: measuring time with precision generates chaos on a universal level, Ares said, adding that with each measurement of time we are closer to the “demise of the universe”. In fact, according to Ares, it might be better to stop measuring time, even if that measurement is done with (theoretical) quantum clocks. (For details, see the story posted on May 7 on NewScientist.com.)

Since the vast majority of modern technology needs an accurate measurement of time to function properly, one cannot help but wonder if the constant measurement of time by countless devices (telephones, computers, watches, and many others) will be one of the factors increasing the chaos of our society. The daily news reports confirm our chaotic state. 

After all, these artifacts, be it a smartphone in my hand or a quantum clock in some laboratory, measure only chronological time, that is, mechanical time or duration. But, as was already known since ancient times, chronological time (chronos) is only one of the times, opposed and irreducible to internal time, the “right moment” (kairos).

We have moved so far away from kairos, a time that is lived, but is not measured, that we do not even know what it is, and we can no longer understand it. And we focus so much on chronos that, it seems, we even create a kind of universal chaos by our obsession with increasingly precise measurements of time. Every second we literally create our own chaos.

Maybe that's why nothing we do seems to make sense. Perhaps that is why we speak of “wasting time”, of “making up for lost time” and even of “free time”, looking at that intersection of time and freedom for a little respite from the non-free time (to use a neutral description) when we sell ourselves, like it or not, almost every day.

But that chaotic, mechanical, and destructive time is and never was the only time, but it has become the only time we have become accustomed to in this hyper-technological age. Perhaps the measurement of time creates chaos to remind us that we are interacting with only one dimension of the many dimensions of time.

Perhaps the chaos does not arise only from measuring chronological time, but also from having abandoned the kairos time, that time in which chronological time ceases to be to give rise to the irruption of super-temporality. But, since we have forgotten it, we only create chaos.

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