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CHAPTER understanding of reality. It is however, just a concept of operation without a precise definition. We even ask ourselves if it exists as a con- ceptual state. Indeed, the past is gone, the future is not yet and as for the present, it ceases to exist when it is ready to begin,” he stated. In other words, Klein asked if anything can exist if it only exists of non- existence. “It only proves refuted,” Marcel Conche wrote. The problem is that if we cannot a priori imagine the existence of time, we cannot imagine its inexistence either, because every experience, human or oth- erwise, seems to follow this abstraction. This actually serves science because causality, the corollary of linear time, is the justification of its contributions! Let us see if it is as solid as we think. We know that psychological time possesses a variable fluidity and that its consistency is quite relative. We have seen that psychological time comes from within. In fact, it varies with age and is determined by the intensity of events. Even temporal isolation experiments on individuals have not been able to elucidate the matter. Therefore, our reflex response is to focus on what is called “physical” time. Klein put it beautifully. “It seems impossible to derive the time of the world from the time of the soul.” Would the seeming aporia wou a re rrr, a. nee aaroa between the punctual instant (before/after) and the living present (immediate past/immediate future) condemn us to incompatibility, i.e. to the principle of excluding a third possibility? Is the thickness of time a chimera? Nothing is less certain! Time is energy in the broadest sense of the word and vice versa (personal conception). In fact, unsta- ble, ephemeral and intangible time is a nuisance to scientists, who 111 Let us take time to think about it “PHYSICAL TIME IS VITAL to the formalized