[3] His work has strongly influenced thinking about the nature of time across the disciplines from physics to sociology, biology to comparative religion, and he was a seminal figure in the general interdisciplinary study of temporality.
His early training had been in physics, but he completed his Ph.D. in 1969 in the Fakultät für Geistes- und Staatswissenschaften (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences) at the University of Hannover,[5] and his dissertation was entitled: Time as a Hierarchy of Creative Conflicts.
Although this work provided a template for many of his later investigations, he had already touched on many of the core ideas in his first articles in 1966, the same year that he founded the International Society for the Study of Time.
Arguably, the distinction between disciplines as diverse as those that epistemically belong in the natural and human spheres of knowledge find their methodological and definitional norms informed by his hierarchical theory of time.
Fraser posits that the universe has emerged into levels of temporality, beginning with the pure energy of the Big Bang, which he terms atemporality (without-time).
In the humanistic sense, it is the perception of time that has changed, as humans have biologically evolved with different concepts of the world to those of our ancestral species.
Fraser builds his reasoning on an interpretation of the nature of time that permits a novel understanding of the dynamics of human values.
He shows that seeking the true, doing what is right, and admiring what is beautiful, far from promoting permanence, continuity, and balance in individual and social affairs, actually perpetuate the chronic insecurity of the time-knowing species and drive its remarkable creativity and frightening destructiveness.
atemporal - blank sheet of paper, objects travelling at speed of light, black hole/Big Bang, causation has no meaning prototemporal - fragmented shaft of an arrow, particle-waves travelling at less than speed of light, instants may be specified only statistically, probabilistic causation joins prototemporal events eotemporal - shaft of an arrow, countable and orderable without a preferred direction, nowless time, physical matter, time orientable but not time oriented, deterministic causation joins eotemporal events biotemporal - short arrow, future, past, present, limited temporal horizons, organic present, simultaneities of necessity, organic intentionality directed toward concrete goals and serving the continuity of the organism's life, multiple and final causation, rigid programming gives way to dynamic programming nootemporal - long straight arrow, "You'll come to me out of the long ago", intentionality directed towards concrete or symbolic goals, serving continued integrity of the self, human actions are connected through symbolic causes known as ideas, the possibility of choice among ideas and corresponding actions is known as human freedom, ideas can produce responses to imaginary challenges sociotemporal - A society is a group of people with a family of conflicts that defines them and distinguishes them from other societies.