Prosecution: Your honour, I would like to begin by pointing out that Time is not helping its case by forcing us to hold the trial in absentia.

Judge: What do you mean? It's right here.

Prosecution: Would your honour please point to the defendant?

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I thought so. The present moment is certainly real, and it's what we are experiencing right now. But the past is merely a thought in our heads, reconstructed whenever we remember. The future is also merely a thought in our heads, and usually an inaccurate one at that. Time is nowhere to be seen except an abstraction in the mind.

Defence: Objection!

Your honour, I would like to present the following pieces of evidence which contradict the prosecution's statement.

First, my watch, which is virtually synchronised with the watches of everyone else in this court. Second, a receipt for an expensive lunch, which I had after my breakfast this morning, but before my dinner this evening. Thirdly, Muriel the Cat - stop trying to scratch me, dammit - whose infernal yowling wakes me up at dawn every morning without fail, even though dawn shifts throughout the year and on some mornings it's too cloudy to see the sun rise. How can you explain all this if time doesn't exist?

Prosecution: To say time doesn't exist doesn't mean that nothing ever happens, or that everything happens simultaneously. It means that what we call time is not in fact an independent entity or dimension, merely the mistaken belief in a whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Those parts are change. There is no such thing as absolute time. When we perceive time passing, it is because we are looking at a thing, and watching it change - whether that be the sun's daily journey across the sky, or a second hand's journey across a clock face, or the sound of our own breathing.

Watch paint dry. Does your sense of time not slow down? Think about a really interesting topic so that your thoughts fly one after the other. Does your sense of time not speed up? Try spending what feels like five minutes on each of these activities, then look at a watch to see how much time has passed.

This isn't a trick of the mind. All time is relative to the thing we are watching change. It so happens that all of us are capable of watching the same thing - like the aforementioned sun, or a well-made watch - which changes at a regular pace, and that makes us think there is an absolute time. We design our clocks and watches so that they all change at the same rate, and this lets us synchronise our activities. Before any kind of clock was invented, people kept time with each other by watching the sun, and no-one would have dreamt of trying to pin down precise times for meetings or other arrangements.

So, to the evidence presented by the defence. All the watches are synchronised because they are made of such materials, and so adjusted in terms of operation, that the changes that give rise to the movement of the hands happen at the same rate. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are co-ordinated based on the rhythm of the Earth's rotation, which is regular enough so that we can schedule activities for certain points in its cycle of change. As for Muriel the Cat, she just has a very good internal clock - a mechanism where chemical changes produce certain results at a regular rate. That clock is influenced by light levels such that it keeps pace with the external world.

In short, time is relative not only in advanced physics, but in the basics of everyday life. Time is simply what happens when someone observes something changing, and assumes that the speed at which it is changing relative to other things (including oneself) says something about the objective structure of reality.

Judge: So does time exist or not, then?

Prosecution: That depends on exactly what you mean by "time".

Judge: Bloody philosophers...

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