Overview
Six Questions of Time is an interactive gallery about the philosophy of time, built as a single web page. It has seven stations arranged in a loop: an entrance and six rooms. Each room poses one question, sets out the main answers to it, and holds an installation you can operate, such as a block of spacetime whose “now” tilts as you change your speed.
Approach
- Structure: The rooms are grouped by question, not by century, so opposing positions share a room. Newton and Leibniz argue in Room I; presentism and the block universe sit side by side in Room III.
- Spatial argument: Each installation makes one claim manipulable. In Room III a velocity slider tilts the plane of simultaneity. In Room IV reversing every velocity sends a gas back toward its low-entropy start. In Room V a coarse-graining slider lines timeless configurations up into a history.
- Reading layer: A glass panel over the scene carries the full text for each room, so a visitor can read the whole argument without operating anything.
- Degradation: Resolution adapts to frame rate, bloom is dropped under load, motion is reduced when the system asks for it, a fallback message replaces the scene when WebGL is unavailable, and every room is reachable from the keyboard.
- Tech: Three.js r128 · WebGL · UnrealBloom · WebXR · vanilla JS, no framework · single self-contained HTML file
What I’d Change
- Put the words on the page: Each room’s text is written into the scene by the script, so search engines and link previews see almost none of it. I’d move the text into the page itself and let the gallery build on top of it.
- Design for phones, not shrink for them: The reading panel works on a phone, but the longer rooms feel cramped because it is a smaller desktop panel rather than a layout made for a small screen.
- The upgrade I didn’t ship: I ported the gallery to the current version of Three.js and compared the two side by side. The port rendered some rooms more crisply, but it nearly tripled the download (149 KB to 419 KB compressed) and shifted the colour palette, so I kept the older version. It is worth switching once the port is slimmed down and the colours are re-tuned.
Sources
- Aristotle, Physics, Book IV.
- Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).
- G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence (1715–16).
- Augustine, Confessions, Book XI (c. 400).
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889).
- Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (lectures of 1905; published 1928).
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927).
- J. M. E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908).
- Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Annalen der Physik 17 (1905).
- Kurt Gödel, “An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation,” Reviews of Modern Physics 21 (1949).
- Kurt Gödel, “A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp (1949).
- Hans Reichenbach, The Direction of Time (University of California Press, 1956).
- Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time (MIT Press, 1987).
- Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (Oxford University Press, 1996).
- David Albert, Time and Chance (Harvard University Press, 2000).
- Bryce DeWitt, “Quantum Theory of Gravity. I. The Canonical Theory,” Physical Review 160 (1967).
- Julian Barbour, The End of Time (1999).
- Alain Connes and Carlo Rovelli, “Von Neumann algebra automorphisms and time-thermodynamics relation in general covariant quantum theories,” Classical and Quantum Gravity 11 (1994).
- Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (4th–5th century).
- Dharmakīrti, Pramāṇavārttika (7th century).
- Dōgen, “Uji” (“Being-Time”), in Shōbōgenzō (1240).