Time Flies, or Does It?

                                        

Not if we accept Albert Einstein’s view:

‘You have to accept the idea that subjective time with its emphasis on the now has no objective meaning. The distinction between past, present and future in only an illusion, however, persistent. There is no ‘past’, ‘present’ or ‘future’. ‘Time’ is a subjective, mind-dependent phenomenon’

I will let you puzzle over that counter intuitive notion from Albert, while I remind myself, as I write this, that Christmas is coming up fast. In this view of time, I am the stationary observer, and time is moving. Whereas “We are coming up to Christmas, Dad..." as my youngest later reminds me, we are moving observers ‘coming up to’ and time is stationary. So is time stationary or moving?

As you go about your daily business you are likely to hear one or all of the following: ‘I don’t know where the time has gone,’; ‘time flies, doesn’t it?’ ‘don’t waste my time’; ‘remember time is money’; ‘we have difficult times ahead’; ‘that time is behind us,’ or, ‘will you be staying a long time or a short time?’  The examples are endless. So why then in the 21^st Century do we talk like this about Time?

Is it because Time is fecund, full of dialectic. Is it because Time means a fixed identity; a comforting identity?  For in our daily lives we are very conscious of the importance of Time, yet when we think of time we are puzzled by its elusive character. We wonder whether we will have ‘enough time’ to do everything we want to do with our lives. When we are bored, we complain that Time ‘drags by’. Myth and poetry often personify time; the figure of ‘Father Time’ persists.

So human beings might be said to be creatures of  Time. We are preoccupied with Time. We wear watches so that we can keep account of Time. We ask regarding the criminal: ‘How much ‘time’ did he get?’ and we ourselves muse: ‘How much ‘time’ do I have left?’ For any argument on Time we are impelled to get time into context. However, this contextual approach presents problems.

For instance if we try to understand – say the universe's dimension of Time we are confronted with eternity. Contemplating eternity is not a concept I wish to reflect on for too long for it has driven better men than me mad. But you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to know that the sun is getting colder and will implode in say 4/5 billions years. What then? The sun and our earth will have been no more than a spasmodic stage of energy and instant of established order. You could say, if you wished to be charitable, that we were just a moment - a smile on the surface of matter.

So it will be the end for us in 4.5 billion years, (don’t accuse me of being an Eeyore, after all it will be 4.5 billion years). But that will not be the end of time? In regard to Time, it is impossible to think of an end – for an end has a limit. So....