- I'm familiar with Eddington's "arrow of time" and the concept's fascinated me since I first encountered it listening to a lecture by Stephen Hawking, and reading his own A Brief History of Time. (The lecture was effectively a chapter from the book.)
- The question of whether or not all clocks are entropic has bothered me ever since.
- It's relatively recent delvings into origins of technology, and recognising that astronomy was in large part the science of time, as well as the fact that most of our historical measures of time were based on astronomical phenomena (the day, month, and year, as well as multiples and subdivisions --- reliance on nonastronomical standards is a modern departure largely undertaken for accuracy but not basis).
- In the Seven Liberal Arts, the trivium concerns data input/output and processing (grammer: parsing input, logic: processing, rhetoric: output), whilst the quadrivum is quantitative: arithmatic is quantity, geometry is quantity in space, music is quantity in time, and astronomy is quantity in space and time. That adds an additional dimension to astronomy, but again, the role of ancient astronomers in timekeeping, prophecy, and navigation remains significant.
Reducing my argument above to its essence, I like the formulation I arrived at in one subthread here, a variant on the "if a tree falls in a forest" conundrum:
If a dead planet orbits a black dwarf whilst tidally locked in an utterly dark Universe, does time exist?
Is the observer necessary?