Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Where time goes

People often marvel at how quickly time goes by. We get busy living our lives, and never notice how much time has slipped through our fingers. For example, my mother-in-law was amazed to realize that it is only two more weeks until Christmas. "Where has the time gone?", she asked my wife.
Time, as near as I can figure it, leaves the point in space that we are currently in. Each of us lives in our own little bubble of space-time, as Einstein put it. That's why time can crawl for some of us, and speed by for others. Which is where the whole theory of relativity comes in.
Now, I won't get too technical here, but my theory is that time leaves our individual bubbles of reality and radiates out from them like the rays from the sun. How quickly the time goes depends on how fast we are moving within our bubbles, and whether or not we are really paying attention.
That is correct, ladies and gentlemen, I have just confirmed that a watched pot never boils, and that time is subjective. Remember that guys, from inside their bubbles, women are not spending any more time in the bathroom than we are. We just can't tell from our side.
At about this point, you are shaking your heads and thinking, "Where does he come up with this stuff?" As I've said, I tend to remember most of what I see and hear. It all goes in, gets mixed up a little bit, and comes back out as my various theories. What you just gotten was a little bit of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Star Trek. (As written by author Diane Duane. I refer you to the book "Wounded Sky", and the theories in it.)
For my niece, who loves my ability to take lines from movies and television and use them to make a point, I will finish with a quote from Babylon Five, in which President John Sheridan tells the station Captain where time goes. "Out there," he says, "beyond the rim." He was referring to the rim of the galaxy, where all of the "first ones" had gone.
I think time moves "out there", to the very edge of the universe. If you feel it is going too fast, just slow down for a little while inside your own bubble of the Universe. The Zen Buddhist monks were on to something when they created the gardens for meditation. If you slow down enough, time... will... eventually... stop.

2 comments:

Steph said...

YaY! A Babylon 5 quote! You have to love Babylon 5...
I shake my head at all those who don't!
Your theories are interesting, and I have to agree on what you said about relativity. It makes sense to me. What we're doing and where we are is going to affect how time seems to pass.

Joe Ganci said...

Alvin Toffler, the author of "Future Shock" had a theory that made a lot of sense. Every day that you live, the longer you live, the shorter each day seems because it represents a smaller percentage of your total life lived thus far. For example, if a one-day old baby could understand and talk and were to ask his parents for a new toy and the parents were to respond that they would buy it the next day, that one-day wait would represent a 100% ratio of the lifetime the baby has lived thus far, making it seem to the baby that he needs to wait a lifetime for the toy. After two days of life, a one-day wait would appear half a lifetime. The longer we live, the faster each day goes.

All this is just another way of looking at the idea that time is relative.

Oh, and Babylon Five rules.