Time In A Bottle

 

"What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is. 

If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." - St. Augustine

 

So then, what IS time?

 

When most people ask questions like that they are referring to what is called physical time.  It's the stuff that clocks are supposed to measure.  It's the flow of change that causes bananas to turn from yellow to brown, seasons to go from winter to summer and back, and women's hemlines to rise and fall.

 

Through most of human history there was the idea that there was such a thing as absolute time.  Time may seem to slow to a crawl while listening to someone explaining the tax laws, yet somehow, somewhere, there had to be a universal time, something measured by God's Swatch. 

 

We know now that there is no such thing.  Time is malleable, it is elastic.  Time can be bent and stretched.  My time and your time will only agree so long as we move along together, side by side.  But once either of us moves away then our time is no longer the same.

 

Take the case known as the twin's paradox.  There is a pair of twins, only a few minutes apart in age.  One becomes an astronaut, and leaves the Earth.  He travels about the universe at an incredible speed, close to the speed of light.  That's 186,000 miles per second!

 

The astronaut twin travels about the nearby universe for what seems to him 1 year.  Yet when he returns to the Earth he finds his twin, and everyone else he loves, has aged 10 years! 

 

If he had travelled faster the difference in ages would have been much greater. If the astronaut twin could have travelled even closer to the speed of light he would have found that his 1 year in space was 100 years on Earth. Or 1,000 years. The faster his speed, the greater the difference in time.

 

You may well be in disbelief.  You may say that the "real" world doesn't work that way.  Consider this, not only have these predictions been verified in the lab, but the equations that describe how time does this are built into the GPS in your car and your smart phone.

 

So keep that in mind when you're navigating down a freeway in a strange city in rush hour traffic.  Your little GPS only works properly because time really does work that way. 

 

Things can get even stranger, yet time always seems to flow in the same direction, just at different rates.  But does it need to?  Some of the best minds studying these issues still do not have a definitive answer. 

 

The math that describes the universe works the same forwards or backwards.  Because of this it's even been suggested that there is only 1 electron in the universe.

 

The positron, a particle exactly like the electron but with an opposite charge, fits the description of an electron moving backwards in time.  This one electron travels from the beginning of the universe to the end, then travels back from the end of the universe to the beginning as a positron. Then back to the end, etc ... etc ... etc.  Each time taking a slightly different path.

 

There is the smallest measure of time, called Planck time.  That is 5 x 10-43 seconds.  Or, .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 seconds. Any smaller unit of time is meaningless.  Anything can happen, so long as it takes no longer than that time.

 

Scientists sometimes refer to "deep time."  That's just another way of talking about the same physical time, but on a scale of the history of the universe.  Deep time is 13 billion years, give or take a week.

 

That's physical time.  What about psychological time?  The time that flies when we're having fun, and crawls when waiting for water to boil.

 

How we measure psychological time is affected by many factors.  

 

Age affects it in the larger view.  When we are 5 years old a year is a whopping 1/5 of our total experience.  At age 50, that year is only 1/10 what it once was.

 

When we are bored time seems to slow down.  It seems the cruelest irony, the more we desire time to hurry and pass by the more it slows down and forces us to think on how miserable we are.

 

Athletes share something in common with shamans and other holy men.  In times of intense physical concentration, just as in times of intense meditation, time becomes almost meaningless. Most people have had the experience of being in a state of deep concentration, like trying to find Waldo, only to realize an hour has passed! 

 

Psychological time is simply how we perceive time, how we feel about it.   And how much we regret sleeping in last Saturday.

 

Jim Croce mused, "If I could save time in a bottle, ..."  

 

Of course, that's impossible.  We all know you can't really save time, you can only spend it.  You can spend it wisely, or you can spend it foolishly.  

 

Or you can let it slip away.