Time is Short

"...a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child." - Albert Einstein

My childhood thoughts about space and time only involved conflict with my sisters over closet space and annoyance that it was always time to do something I didn't want to do. I guess Einstein's childhood thoughts were different than mine. What a surprise.

I don't know if you heard but the days are shorter this week than they have been in the recent past. That's because of the earthquake in Chile. It seems the quake made the earth smaller around the middle (why can't I achieve that?) so it spins faster, thus the shorter day. Well, it is just a little teeny fraction shorter but I think we might miss the time.

I have heard that the most often used word in the English language, other than articles like a, and and the, is "time." I think that shows just how important the loss of even a little time will be. I know I never have time to do all the things I want to do and now...

What do we know about time, anyway? We seem to move through it and it seems to be a one way traffic kind of thing, but is it? Einstein's theory says that when we travel by air, we age more slowly than those we leave on the ground and if we were able to travel at the speed of light we wouldn't age at all. What a peculiar life that would be. I don't think I'd want to live forever if it involved perpetual airline food. In fact, I think that might end your life even without the time factor.

Then there is time travel. It seems attractive but is fraught with difficulties as any science fiction writer can tell you. We'd surely mess up something important while trouping through the past and what would we be likely to find in the future? Just a place where we don't exist anymore and that would be upsetting since most of us are convinced the world can't do without us.

Then there is the theory that we are living in one dimension which is right up against many other dimensions that feature slightly different versions of our reality, like a series of reflections in a mirror with minute changes in each reflection until by the last one you can see, big things are different. Some scientists think near misses in our dimension affect the next one. If you believed that, every day life would be kind of tense. Suddenly, the near accident you felt lucky to have missed has caused your other dimension selves pain. I'm not sure how this theory meshes with time theory, or if it does, but it sounds like it could be a bad time all around.

What thoughts do you have on time, or do you think it's better to save the time you'd spend thinking about it for other pursuits?