Words Have Meaning

I recently watched a lecture on time by a deservedly famous Berkeley physics professor. Apparently time is not a settled  topic among physics experts. The professor said repeatedly that time cannot be defined.

When I looked a few minutes ago, time was defined in Webster's Dictionary. Also "time" is a word we invented, and there is no such creature as an undefined word. Words have meaning. If they don't, they aren't words.

If you go around claiming that time cannot be defined, you may seem ignorant or you may seem deeply profound. "Time cannot be defined" is one of those strong-sounding statements that mislead those who utter them as much as those who hear them.

I suspect that what the physics professor meant, in an unclear way, was that time is a fuzzy word we can't make more exact in physics. Fuzzy concepts are often, all the way to the bottom, fuzzy. That's must be true for hundreds of thousands of English words, and there is nothing remarkable about "time" except that the Big Bang created time and, eventually, English, which in turn yielded rolling confusion about fuzzy terms.