“I don’t know how it got this late.” I said to my dog. “Well,” I
continued, “I do know. I worked late, and I’ve been reading…” But then
I stopped. I stopped because I realized that neither of those, or any of
the other excuses we give for “how time flies” have anything to do with
“how it got this late”. They’re merely how we came to not notice the
passage of time to this point. But we have absolutely no idea how it
passed. Some scientists have theories that describe its passage but not
the real how or why of it. The energy of the Big Bang must be
nothing in comparison to the energy required to move everything in all
the universes forward through time. And yet, we sit here, not just
ignorant, but not even noticing this force that is exerting an obscene
amount of influence on our lives. It’s like someone has launched us from
a cannon strapped to the back of a rocket while we continue to discuss
the movie we saw last weekend as if we were calmly sitting on a park
bench. And even that… even that metaphorical park bench is on a planet
rotating at 465.1 m/s at its equator, 18 1/2 m/s around a sun, that is
itself hurtling away from the center of our universe, and somehow we
delude ourselves into thinking we’re stationary upon it. And all of this
is nothing, nothing, to the force that moves us through time. I see
two possibilities, although I’m sure there are more: 1) time is an
incredible pushing force, and maybe the reason we can’t travel back in
time is because we can’t overcome its inertia. I read a theory once,
that went something like this: if you had a rod that was infinitely long
and infinitely dense, that you could get spinning sufficiently fast, and
then spiraled a space ship around it, the ship would be able to travel
back in time. Now, I am woefully ignorant of physics, and quantum
mechanics, but that sounds a lot like expending energy to overcome an
opposing force. 2) all time exists in one instant so infinitesimally
fine we don’t have words, concepts, or even brains capable of
encompassing it. To me a two dimensional plane, with no thickness at
all, is still infinitely thicker than the size of an instant with all
time. If all time exists in an instant, then maybe we are just creatures
whose way of processing it is to have created a linear perception of it.
Maybe those days that seem to fly by in a blink really do. We know that
if you travel fast enough time flows more slowly for you, like
astronauts coming back to earth only to find that the time they spent
away from us was seconds shorter than the time we spent waiting for them
to come back. Maybe, those days, where so much happens so fast, that go
by in a blink, go by in a blink because so much happened so fast. If
all time exists at once, and it is merely a perception that we’re
traveling through it one slice at at time, then who is to say ones
perception doesn’t actually move them through it faster? I mean, when
the astronauts land it’s not like someone went in and cut out seconds of
their life. Somehow they end up with us at the same place in time, and
yet they got there sooner than the rest of us. I think the physicists
can prove me wrong on that theory, but isn’t it a wonderful one to try
and wrap your head around? Regardless of how time works, or why time
works, it concerns me that we are so utterly oblivious to a force that
affects us so completely, and with such disregard. We give it lip
service, we speak as if it’s this obvious thing we all understand, but
we haven’t a clue, and I, like you, have no idea how it got this late…
