"Position" is to "space" as what word is to "time"?

Is there an English word that is the temporal equivalent to "position"? As position can be described as "where you are", I can think of "when you are" as the temporal meaning.

Information on how it will be used in order to be answered (quoted from a comment by the OP which has since been moved to chat):

If a time traffic controller were to speak to a time traveller, though, can he say "I'll need you to supply your current moment please before we can arrange your landing."? Or does it only feel unnatural because we never use moment like that. Because we don't have time travel to require lingo like that?


A moment (in time), according to Collins Dictionary a moment is:

"a specific instant or point in time"

Attribution: "Definition of 'moment'." Moment Definition and Meaning | Collins English Dictionary. Accessed March 27, 2018. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/moment.


Technically and even mathematically speaking, that would be an instant, which can be thought of as a more technical term for a moment. This is how Wikipedia defines it:

An instant is an infinitesimal moment in time, a moment whose passage is instantaneous.

For example:

The object was in this position (these coordinates) at this instant in time.

Mathematically, the precise position of an object can be described using a position function. Thus, we are always able to say precisely what position the object is in at any particular instant (moment) in time. You plug in a particular instant of time (t) into the position function, and out pops its position precisely at that instant (or moment). That's literally the kind of lingo that mathematicians would use.


"Time"!

At least, that's the word we most often use for what you might call the "temporal coordinate" of an event, analogous to the position of an event being its "spatial coordinate". For example, one might say that the position of an event was the north-west corner of the building and the time of the event was 7:34pm.

Other answers have suggested things like "moment" or "instant". These are good if you want a word meaning "a location in time" analogous to position being "a location in space".


I'd suggest "Point in time"

"Point in time is sometimes useful, though. It may indicate that point refers to time instead of space—though context usually fills in the blank. And when it comes to point in time (and similarly with point in space), one can bypass this issue by removing point in and keeping time."

http://grammarist.com/usage/point-in-time/


Position is a word that locates a particular spot in space. A date locates a particular 'spot' in time at the granularity of '1 Day'. For granularity finer than a day, people often ask for the date and time, where time is understood to be the time of day (e.g. 3pm), and can be expressed to whatever precision is required.

date noun 1.1 A particular day or year when a given event occurred or will occur. ‘they've set a date for the wedding’ - ODO