All the hubbub over the new year has me thinking about time; how much importance we place upon it, and how elusive it really is. We can measure the passing of time with ridiculous precision, but what does it actually mean? A rose in the garden knows when to bloom, the Earth returns to a certain (relative) place in its orbit of the star we call the Sun about every 365 1/4 days as we reckon them, yet our demarcation of these things is completely arbitrary. Clocks in Amsterdam and Wellington automatically read exactly 12 hours apart because of data bouncing off artificial satellites, we can time-coordinate international flights within seconds, we can send exploratory spacecraft to intercept comets, and yet--here it is again--however we all as a planet have managed to agree about local time, the International Date Line, and the World Clock, this is all, still, COMPLETELY ARBITRARY in the grand scheme of the Universe. Its our little conceit, which we believe helps us master the complex world in which we live. Oh, sure, its useful as all get out; we all enter into this agreement that Time Is This, and we can construct incredible, intricate networks which infiltrate nearly every square foot of the planet. Its fookin amaaaaazing, man. Have you ever gotten on a short wave radio and listened to the broadcast of the World Clock? There is something kind of science-magical about it, really, very IGY and Space Age. I am all for it. This, however, does not change the fact that for hydrogen molecules on Pluto and frozen microbes on Mars, much less green-skinned aliens from Aldebaran, our concept of time matters not a whit. If there is other intelligent life in the Universe, it may have constructed a completely different kind of system for keeping track of time. And of course if they ever venture here to Earth, or if we go to wherever those beings might be, there will be the Redshift/Einsteinian situation (as we tend to think of it); where the time of the traveler in space and that of the more stationary being, will have passed at different rates. Its a lot to wrap your brain around. Read up on it, it is quite fascinating, this whole Time business. But what I really want you to think about is well-expressed by that last example, the Space-Time Continuum warp of a traveler approaching the speed of light. Because what it really means is that thing again--our concept of the passage of time is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY. 2015? January? 7:37am? Here, sure. But not necessarily there. So, when you find yourself saying things like there arent enough hours in the day, or I wish I had more time to...., remember this: although there may be some real world consequences of bucking the carefully constructed system that we as humans have set up and agreed to acknowledge; even so, your own perception of time is (probably) based on this Completely Arbitrary system, and therefore if you shift your perception, you may find you have more time for the things you love and want in your life. Its kind of up to you. Choose your battles, but be aware that you are a creature on a planet which is spinning round, and which is also spinning round a star, which is spinning round a galaxy...and so on and on. We humans created our measurement of Time in order to master it, but we often find ourselves being mastered by it rather than the opposite. Our personal time here is the time which travels with us, and it may only vary by a millisecond from someone elses time, but we can make it our friend with which to explore, instead of an obstacle or a boundary. Its all in how you look at it. The more you study time, just like studying matter and subatomic particles, the less rigid it seems. Isnt that cool? https://m.youtube/watch?v=XnXTi0wzfyQ
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 12:40:25 +0000
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