Introduction

My interest in time began collecting rocks and fossils as a young child and trying to image time spans counted in millions or billions of years and still have little ‘feeling’ for how long such lengths of time really are. Deep geological time is just one aspect of time that is ‘beyond our senses’, however, visuaisation provides a means of seeing and understanding temporal patterns and processes that would otherwise be hidden from us.

Mohammad Iqbal’s poem is concerned with how physics tells us our experience of time is incompleate and how that knowledge structures his personal relationship with God (Hassan, 1984). Iqbal may speak of physics and God but his words resonate with me as a call to try and step out of ‘the now’ to experience and then expose the world from other spatial and temporal perspectives.

This is my personal reflective guide to time and its visualization. It aims is to stimulate thought and reflection on time while also providing some practical advice on visualizing temporal data. It reflects my knowledge, interests, and biases, so should not be regarded as comprehensive. Links are provided to the sources of all media that are not mine, and some supporting citations are provided. I am responsible for all errors and wild speculation.

The guide has four sections:

1. Aspects of time
2. Visualising time
3. Visualising space and time
4. Conclusions