“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2
I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™. They are watchdogs.
Time.
Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.
The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.
Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.
Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.
Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.
Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle: being riddled with bullets.
We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.
My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.
But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!”
He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.
Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.
I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.
For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.
If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.
But that’s not everything.
As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it.
Three clowns were eating a cannibal. One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”
Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.
I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.
There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.
Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.
The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is . . . difficult.
Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.
And yet . . .
Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.
They did not see that coming.
Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.
Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.
Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.
Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.
I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:
Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.
I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.
I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.
Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift.
Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count.
Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.
I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is . . . difficult.
I think you’ll be getting some help on this one.
From James Taylor:
The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
The secret of time is that time isn’t really real.
From Gandalf: (paraphrased)
We don’t get to choose the times in which we live. We only can choose what to do with the time we are given.
Ha! Thank you – yes, I’m sure I’ll see some new ones!
Gandalf was spot on.
The concept of time has always intrigued me, as well.
“Christ and Time, 3rd Edition: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History,” by Oscar Cullman, is an excellent theological examination.
https://1lib.us/book/1169009/f91a64?id=1169009&secret=f91a64
Cullmann spent a lot of time researching this work, for sure.
Zlibrary has over 8 million other PDF books, including many many scholarly religious works that can be downloaded. Enough reading to last a lifetime.
https://1lib.us/
Downloaded!
Nice! I’ll see if I can find a copy of that.
Whether you rush through it, or lazily watch it pass, sooner, or later, your run out of time… unless you’re a photon.
Imagine your perception of time as a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The full reel on the left is your future, which as a kid seems to arrive so slowly. As it unwinds it gradually speeds up until you’re wondering where it all went so quickly.
Exactly! I try to imagine being a photon, but then everything would happen all at once . . .
Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future…
Since time itself is but an illusion, once I hit 50 I decided to start counting backwards. Why not? They are my years and I can do any damn thing I want with them. Eventually I will be too young to drive, too young to vote, and I can return to underage drinking, which was the best kind, most of all.
I took the added precaution of never growing up, too. So if I choose to not work and bang on this drum all day, you’ll just have to say that it’s a phase I am regressing through.
If the Rolling Stones can be ageless, so can I. After all, time is on my side. Yes, it is.
Have you seen Keith Richards? Ageless?
Chemically preserved. Undead, perhaps?
Know all the questions
but not the answers
look for the different instead of the same
never walk with his room for running
and don’t do anything that can’t be a game
Ahhh, backwards time. The worst would be to be five and have to listen to “adults.”
I recall reading once that the Soviet Union spent countless rubles at that city where all the top researchers went, trying to generate power from the passage of time.
The math involved is daunting, as one might expect.
I suggest that your premise here is a correct one. This is why choosing to work for someone is the greatest gift you can give; hiring someone is not a favour being done, but the receipt of a privilege.
Few employers see it that way.
This is a shame.
The way our time is being wasted by those in power is beyond offensive.
Too much time on my hands- Styx
I’ve never had too much time on my hands – always too little. Except at the dentist’s office.
Time is spin.
I realize that doesn’t help much. Some knowledge has little practical use.
I’ll give that a look . . . any more tidbits?
Not really. It’s too much to explain, and too simple to explain easily. (Yes, that makes sense once you understand that simple is hard while complicated is easy.)
It’s not what the mainstream “scientists” say. They don’t say anything on the topic, other than, “Do the math.” (They have no idea what Spin is, other than denying that it is any sort of physical rotation, while describing it as angular momentum and absolutely essential to existence.) Then again, most of them are button counting, bottle washing mid-wits who were trained to not think too hard. However, it’s obvious once you’ve though about it long and hard enough. Math requires complex numbers to be complete. Normal physics only uses real numbers. This explains a great deal.
Starting point: Special Relativity is simply the careful application of the Pythagorean Theorem to motion. General Relativity puts that into a moving picture, and incorporates change over time. Quantum computing is advanced hokum based on the lie of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Okay, a lot to think about, but like Hansel, I’ll need a LOT more breadcrumbs.
I wish I could help. I really do. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible teacher, and I’ve studied and thought about these topics for years, and written very little of it down. I’ve picked it up and unpacked it one tiny breakthrough at a time.
Just know that the popular explanations, while entertaining, aren’t exactly accurate. (Pratchett’s “lies for children”.)
There are many things that are taught that are contradictory or just factually wrong. Here’s one – Bell’s theorem is a circular strawman.
The key lies in asking the right question – what is motion? A standing wave (local gradients). This explains redshift, along with time and space dilation.
Points, waves, and gradients are everything. Most things sum up to zero. Gravity is not a pull, but a push from space-time gradient that has a non-zero baseline. Special relativity equations end up being sine and cosine functions of the slope of the space-time gradient. Black holes are probably hollow shells (that which cannot exist does not exist). There are no contradictions. The laws of nature are simple (math is not). The three dimensions of space describe motion in a direction, so time must be in some different direction, presumably at 90 degrees (spin). Left handed and right handed spins obey fundamentally different laws (weak force, neutrinos).
A lot there in just a few sentences . . .
Didn’t I graduate high school back in June? 53 years ago. What a cruel joke.
It does move fast . . .
Regarding your “Yo mama” chart at the end….
I am not a physicist; I only played a wanna-be in college before I became an aerospace engineer because the pay was better. To vastly oversimplify something I don’t understand…
There is no actual thing called “space” and there is no actual separate thing called “time”. Einstein showed there is actually only something called “spacetime” that you can divvy up in whatever ratio you want of what you perceive as “space” and “time” in your personal environment (“reference frame”) by controlling your velocity through it.
But there’s still more to the story that we don’t understand. One of the best general-audience discussions in the past few years has been the books by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, particularly “The Order Of Time”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7
Get your cheap copy here…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184991732245?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=184991732245&targetid=1262779894729&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1013042&poi=&campaignid=10455978148&mkgroupid=122766957832&rlsatarget=pla-1262779894729&abcId=2146002&merchantid=6296724&gclid=CjwKCAjw7rWKBhAtEiwAJ3CWLBz2Dwf8pe-0kearLGrMb7QF6Hu-8Qz7EoAhKRi8t_lZ5Xn2XjOQERoCCTYQAvD_BwE
There is a growing belief that somehow time is tied to the black hole that the matter making up our bodies and our planet and our star is all going to fall into in the far distant future. This is most probably Sagittarius A*, the drain hole that the entire Milky Way galaxy is currently spiraling down into, altho it’s possible that we could be destined to go down the black hole currently at the center of Andromeda galaxy when it crashes into the Milky Way to form a mixed galaxy called Milkomeda in another 4-5 billion years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A* and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision for the gory details.
I don’t expect to see any of this myself. Sigh, I’ve only got up to 20 more years or so looking at the butterflies and hummingbirds and flowers my wonderful wife provides out on the back patio, where sometimes I look up at Sagittarius and wonder just what is up there…
Anyway, there is something very mathematically strange about the “event horizon” surface of a black hole. Just like spatial movement is limited to only one direction once you cross an event horizon (inward), there is a growing belief among some physicists that time is mathematically limited to only one direction (forward) for any spacetime history path that ultimately leads up to and into an event horizon. In one sense, the black hole would be like a movie projector that is shining a time ray out into space, playing out the history (path thru space) that any and all atoms of your body took to get there. Um, sadly this kind of math leads to determinism and no free will. You can’t have everything.
To change the subject…
John, your comments about a lack of novelty as you grow older affecting your perception of time is very insightful. I have actually been doing something in the past few months to combat that decline. Decades ago I was involved in a project where I worked with the (totally inadequate) virtual reality gear of the 1990s to see if it could provide training to astronauts whose work time on orbit costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. So I’ve always been interested in virtual reality. Back in the spring I went to one of the Van Gogh Immersive Experience (VGIE) setups that are popping up in major cities around the country. FANTASTIC. DO NOT MISS GOING IF ONE IS AVAILABLE TO YOU.
https://vangoghexpo.com/
At the end of VGIE, I put on one of the new (well, year-old) Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headsets that are being put out by Overlord Zuck as The Facebook Of The Future. WOW. An incredible walk (well, floating like a ghost) thru a charming French village, passing by floating empty picture frames that became the paintings he did of each of the scenes beyond. VR gear has come a LONG, LONG way from what I remember from the 90s….
I was so impressed that I came back and bought an Oculus Quest 2 of my own and have been playing with it for some months now. VR is not just for Millennials playing shoot-em-up games. I have wandered around the African savannah with elephants, swam with manta rays, flown thru China’s incredible Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, hid in Anne Frank’s apartment from Nazis, taken a gondola in Venice, floated around in an exact replica of the International Space Station, been a crewmember in a cramped Apollo 11 spacecraft, and so so so much more. It’s not perfect, but VR is unlike any other experience you will ever have. It’s better than HD widescreen TV in your home and it’s better than IMAX theatres. The immersion aspect – turn your head and see something else, the dirt at your feet, the clouds above your head – does something really deeply psychological. Watching screens, you know subconsciously that you are watching a screen. Wearing an Oculus, you are almost instantly tricked into believing You Are There.
Getting an Oculus is way cheaper than getting a 3 day voyage on a cruise ship, and it is a ticket to many, many travel experiences you would otherwise never have. Highly recommended for retire geezers who want to break out of a lack of novelty.
That said, VR gear is the most dangerous technology ever invented. I have posted a few times links here detailing how millions of young people are wasting their lives on endless video game hours, the modern bread and circuses. China is cracking down and banning this among their youth. Ours may very well never want to take the VR goggles off to take a stand the real world with all its flaws and problems.
For me, I will always enjoy seeing those hummingbirds and butterflies and flowers and stars mentioned above with my very own eyes in my very real back yard.
I’m glad to know that a’m not alone in being an engineer who thought to become a physicist! And i share with Mr Wilder the fascination about “time” since i was a very young boy.
Very insightful (spacetime and black holes – that’s a new one for me). What´s time anyway? In human realm is an arbitrary measure of how many turns around the sun we made (why 60 minutes? why 24h ? why 30 days? why 4 seasons?).
At same time it has to be a fundamental property of the universe: a measure of entropy, the reason behind cause-effect. At the quantum physics theory level it is mind blowing! Is the time flow continuous or discrete (quantum time?)? It is easy to understand a “travel to the future”, but is it possible to travel back in time ? Try to reason about that! There are some good movies about this topic (Predestination comes to mind…).
But, back to earth. When you realize that you got more years behind you than the remaining ones, that you will never be able to accomplish everything you would want to do, then it s the moment you have to put “time” in the correct mundane perspective and choose wisely what to do withe the time gave to you at each new day.
I hope i made myself clear, i don’t like to use translators and try to write direct in English.
Seu inglês é excelente, meu português é inexistente. Saúde!
Ha, olha só! Saudações!
Yup, physics was my first major, too.
I’m very well educated – I dropped out of college twice! My first major was engineering physics. Then I dropped out to join the Army and fight communists. Later on, my major was computer science. Then I dropped out to join the Army again after I noticed that I was fixing the grad students’ thesis projects in the labs. Oh, how I lamented that the EE majors had no idea what the math they were working on actually did in the real world.
The black hole projector idea is interesting. Gonna have to give it some thought. In the end, is that the “final observer”?
Always a favorite.
Time can always be slowed down.
Grab a hot skillet bare-handed and hold it for one second.
Or watch an episode of Ellen. With special guest Nancy Pelosi.
It can also be speeded up.
Go outside on a Saturday, and play until the streetlights come on.
Take a week’s vacation from work.
Stephen Hawking can eat my dust.
Or visit the Department of Licensing…
Heheh Agreed. Spending time with my x gave me another dozen years of life.
My objection to VR (and audio/video entertainment in general) is that it just doesn’t smell like anything. There’s nothing like a particular scent to conjure up a moment of travel to a distant past. It’s not just roses, but a dusty rural road under summer sun, the ferns crushed under a fresh-caught brook trout slipped into a wicker creel under sun-soaked pines… VR me this, Batman!
Valid point. The association of smell with memory is very real, I have my own personal examples.
As an aside, this was a key point in the somewhat obscure novel and later Hulu TV series Chance with Hugh Laurie, playing Dr. Eldon Chance as an encore to his far more widely known Dr. Gregory House. (I’m a big Hugh Laurie fan going all the way back to Blackadder). He has a perfume collection, a “library of scents”, that play a key role in …well, see for yourself.
As another aside, many people here would enjoy the dialog and monologs of D in that show, Chance’s guide and instructor in urban and one-on-one survival tactics as its excellent neo-noir story unfolds….
Lol, all of that to say this. VR can’t duplicate your past scent memory associations…but it can create
new ones. Discover the world of wax melts and just turn on your wax warmer right before you put on the vR headset…
https://www.waxmeltreviews.com/
Very nice. But of course, some smells I’d prefer to forget . . .
I long ago discovered how to travel back in time.
Currently I’m shifting between 1776, the Lewis & Clark Expedition Journals, the life of Jim Bridger (interesting fact: the movie The Revenant was loosely based on a true story from Jim Bridger’s life – he was possibly the young kid who stayed to help the wounded tracker, Hugh Glass), and George Armstrong Custer (“Custer’s Trials”). A couple pages each day is all it takes to appreciate the fact we live (for the moment) in a time when we can afford a leisurely stroll through the past.
It seems my interest in the future is mostly a search for consistency. Too many things are changing, and too fast. Of course, there’s nothing more consistent day to day than the grave, so I’m not a fanatic about it.
Yup. I’m in no hurry, myself.
every beat of your heart is a gift
Indeed. And I try to live life like that’s the case.
My take: time flows so slowly for children vs. adults because they have so little to “look forward” to. Birthday, holidays, then what? Cf. adults – the days are packed tighter than a Chesterfield.
Nice thought. That’s true – are we busying ourselves to death?
It’s a natural occurrence until I told myself I have to say no once in a while. I did that when the kids were young and I was filling the evenings with “stuff”.
It stemmed from my years at general motors when I observed people working themselves to much climbing the corporate ladder. I told myself based on how I grew up that I was a family man and not much longer I was outta there and never looked back.
Especially after the head boss told me he did not have a job for me since I declared I was no longer mobile due to possibly getting married. I wasn’t mad at him he was a straight shooter just doing his job. I tracked down my future wife within 48 hours and proposed.
Good for you! Now Pugsley is now here 10 minutes a night. We’ll miss him so when he goes away.
Excellent post and comments. Cheers you guys.
Great bunch of folks, right???
We’re lucky.
“building a model of a Phantom F-4”. Fourth grade and my favorite one. Got displayed in a case at the elementary school.
Excellent post John and even better comments and videos. I am behind on my reading here but this made my day. I have wasted a lot of time in my life but don’t remember much of it mostly remember the good times and wise quotes. “All I can give them is my time” – Dad, to other adults when growing up. I knew I had it good growing up, just did not know how good I had it till he was gone. Miss him every day, hope he would be proud of my parental efforts as he only got 13 years of observation.
I made my last model so the wing tips folded up. Good times.
I’m sure he would be proud.