July 21, 2025
The concept of time as it relates to emergency incidents has always fascinated me. The idea that microsecond differences, or slight shifts in the order of events can prevent or cause a tragedy. Quick response and early intervention can resolve an emergency before it spirals out of control. Meanwhile, the aftereffects of tragedy can last for generations, but the public’s interest in learning what happened often fades within weeks. How does time interact with all of that?
An example. On June 12, 2023 there was an unexpected traffic jam. Amongst all the other people trying to navigate the traffic, was a 28 year old student from London. As she tells the story, she was angry and frustrated. As she was getting angry with her driver, she kept thinking, “if I had just left a few minutes early I could of avoided this traffic.” She remembers everyone else in that traffic jam also irritated, honking and maneuvering to try and get to their destination. It was of no use though, she couldn’t make up the time, she missed it. The digital ticket in her hand was of no use. Seat 36G on Air India flight 171. Once she missed the time for departure she went to a café to try and work with the travel agent for another ticket. That is where she heard the news. Air India went down shortly after takeoff.
Unfortunately, the families of the victims will likely carry the moments before the flight forever, burdened by relentless “what-ifs.” Those stuck in the traffic that day, however, probably never new that in the midst of their frustration, that they were saving a life by participating in a traffic jam. Time and timing is weaved into tragedy, disasters, preparedness, response, and aftermath. In a previous article on emergency decision-making, I noted that in crisis management, “we do have a formidable enemy: time.”
Time Keeps on Ticking: Our Battle Against Time
If time is the enemy, than like any foe it is best to learn as much as we can about it. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it’s as simple as the second hand, it just keeps ticking. Regardless, in order to get to know my enemy, I wanted to explore some of the ideas and theories around time.
What is time, exactly?
Is it movement of the sun? Or rotation of the earth? The resonant frequency of atoms? The clock on the microwave? Could time be structured like Dr. Emmett Brown theorized in “Back to the Future”? Or is it more like Tony Starks theory of multi-verse type structure?
Hopefully science and physics has some answers. Here we go.
Time is a concept so familiar we use it constantly, yet defining it is surprisingly difficult. I like what Saint Augustine said: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I do not know.”
We tend to think about time in simple terms, something like what Einstein said: “Time is what the clock measures.” That sounds like an oversimplification, but it gets at the core idea, time is something we measure. It’s a dimension along which events unfold. We measure it all the time: response time, turnout time, downtime.
Despite the seemingly simple definition of time, Einstein also had this theory called relativity. He showed that time is not a separate, universal constant ticking the same for everyone. Instead, time is linked to space, forming what we now call space-time. In this view, time is a dimension like length or height. It gives structure to when things happen, just as space tells us where they happen.
Relativity also revealed that time is not experienced the same way by everyone. The faster you move, or the farther you are from a gravitational source, the more time stretches or slows compared to someone else. Time dilation.
For example, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is one of the few galaxies we can see without a telescope, is about 2.5 million light years or 14,910,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. The view of the galaxy we observe is what it looked like 2.5 million years ago. It took 2.5 million years for those light photons to reach our eye. But, if those photons had a stopwatch with them for that journey from the galaxy to your eye, the stopwatch would register zero. From the photon’s perspective, the moment it left a star in the Andromeda Galaxy and the moment it hit your eye on Earth would be the same instant. No time passes in its own frame of reference.
So time isn’t constant. It can stretch or pause depending on motion and gravity. This idea is not just theoretical. It affects how we use GPS. It affects how satellites stay in sync. It affects how we understand time in emergency operations.
We can move forward and backward in space. Time only seems to move in one direction, from past to future. That direction gives us order. One thing happens, then another. Cause comes before effect. That’s what lets us understand sequences. It’s also what makes time feel like it flows.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines time as “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Time is the ongoing unfolding of events.
We built clocks and calendars to keep track of it. Seconds, minutes, and years all tie back to natural movement, the spin of the Earth, its orbit around the sun. Time feels real. We age in time. Every responder knows the pressure of a ticking clock.
Still, some physicists and philosophers have questioned whether time is as real as it feels. Some think it’s an illusion or something that only emerges from deeper rules of nature. There are theories that time could run both ways. Others suggest that past, present, and future all exist at once in a “block universe.”
But let’s be practical and get out of the weeds. Maybe we can agree on the idea that time is the space where events happen. It keeps everything from happening at once. In day-to-day life, it moves in one direction. We remember the past, not the future. Fires burn wood into ash, not the other way around. That’s where the idea of time’s arrow comes in.
Physicists link this arrow to entropy, the idea that systems naturally move from order to disorder. Eggs break. Smoke spreads. Buildings decay. That’s the usual direction of things.
Once something breaks, it doesn’t unbreak. Once something burns, we can’t unburn it. Responders often wish they could rewind the clock and stop a tragedy before it happened. But we can’t. We can only act in the present. That’s why early action matters. Prevention beats repair. The arrow only moves forward.
But maybe now isn’t what we think it is.
We talk about the present like it’s a single point in time. One dot on a timeline. But the present seems more like a span. It holds a little of what just happened and a little of what’s about to. It’s not a sharp line. It’s a blurry zone.
That day in the traffic jam, the student didn’t survive because of one second. She survived because of a stretched-out moment full of frustration, delay, and the timing of strangers. That moment wasn’t a clean, single moment. It was messy blob of “now”.
In Part 2, I’ll look closer at that idea. What we call the present might be wider than we think. It might be shaped by memory on one side and prediction on the other. Which means that just when I said I was getting out of the weeds, I’m probably walking right back into them. See you there.
Part 2 – When is now? – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/responding-time-part-2-when-now-jonathan-boyd-otgic