Astronomical Images : Continuous time: impossibility of atoms of time

Aristotle

Astronomical Images

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This work comprises Aristotle's <i>Physics</i> and Thomas Aquinas's commentary edited by the Augustinian, Timoteo Maffei of Verona (d. 1470). Aristotle discussed the nature of motion in the latter books of <i>Physics</i>, often referring to figures to elucidate his points. These figures were not always illustrated, and there was no traditional stock of figures like the wind diagrams or concentric circles associated with the Aristotelian analysis of motion. This edition makes an effort to supply such figures. In <i>Physics</i>, book 8, chapter 8, after having argued that an instant of time that divides states that counteract each other ' so that the object is always in either the one state or the other ' does not have a dual function of ending the past and beginning the future, Aristotle goes on to argue that time cannot be divided into indivisible (or atomic) parts. D is an object in the process of becoming white in the moment or 'atom' of time A, which is indicated on the left-hand side of the bar above. To the right is the next atom of time B, at which D has become white. Since in the time A, D was not white but was only becoming so, whereas in time B it is white, some act of becoming white must have taken place between A and B. And so there was time between them for this generation to occur. But it was already posited that B was the next atom of time to A, so there cannot be another atom of time between them. (Aristotle, <i>Physics</i> VIII.8.263b27-264a7, trans. Wicksteed and Cornford.)</p>