The Idea of a Cosmic Time
Mogens True Wegener
Revised version. This paper was written in honour of Franco Selleri, faithful defender of reason in physics, who committed his efforts to "the liberation of time from the enslavement to space". - Pointing to the cleft between the idea of a temporal evolution, central to modern biology, and the idea of the timelessness of reality derived from the relativization of simultaneity and followed by the fusion of space and time into space-time, both fundamental to modern physics, the paper demonstrates that the standard definition of time at a distance is beset with ambiguities that might be solved by making a fresh start which takes its point of departure in the idea of a Cosmic Time, as proposed by the British Tradition of relativistic cosmology.
