The Trouble with Time

Having been quarantined here at home since the middle of March, time appears to be crawling slower then normal. But that is, of course, silly. Time does not crawl, or leap, or even fly, Time just is. We are the ones that assign specific parts to time; years, (one earthly revolution around the sun), days, (the interval between one rising of the sun and the next), and various separate parts to that, (hours, minutes, seconds).

There is no absolute time, Albert Einstein said, (creating the concept of spacetime). His time and my time would not the same depending on how fast we are moving away from each other. The faster we go, the greater the effect of time dilation we would experience. But in normal life, we do not experience any changes of time since we are not moving fast enough. To make matters worse, years later, in his Theory of General Relativity, he said that massive objects such as stars and planets can warp and distort the fabric of spacetime and the motion of such a body and its gravity can slow time. So if we passed by a gravity heavy black hole, we would experience time at a much slower rate, while the rest of the universe continued on normally.

The Theory of General Relativity does not explain why we experience time as a continual flow, (Times Arrow). Because, at the subatomic level, atoms and particles show no preference for time. They would function just as well going forward or backwards in time. On a human level there is an obvious direction from the past into the future, we all age, and will all eventually die and decay. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that any system will increase its quantity of disorder over time, in other words, entropy will always multiply, so is that what time is? No one is really sure.

Time is said to exist all at once, past, present and future, but our human brains clearly have a preference to perceive time as now. That appears to be good enough for most everyone, since we all interact with each other now, but we can imagine ourselves interacting with someone in the future so we must be aware of time as a whole since we can certainly recall past events with perfect clarity as well. If we were somehow able to disconnect our minds from now, would we be able to roam around time at any point in our lives? And would that be good for our mental stability? Probably not, we are driven relentlessly by entropy from one high point to one low point, and that should be good enough for one life. I really couldn’t handle a few more.

(Thankfully we have constructed lives around the imagined passage of time, Apple and my i-watch says so.)

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