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Time

If you are anything like me you remember the impact that the Christmas holidays had on your life as a child.

The most eagerly anticipated day of the year was that Friday in mid-December that marked the last day of school for the six weeks of the holidays.

For some reason the days seemed warmer, the skies bluer and the breezes gentler back then when those six short weeks seemed to last an eternity.

The world was ours and countless adventures lay in store as we enjoyed over a month of freedom from the confines of our classrooms. Nothing else mattered because six weeks was such a long time we knew it would seem like forever.

More than sixty years later, my appreciation of time has changed significantly.

Here we are, well into the first week of February and it seems like Christmas was only yesterday.

What was, as a primary school kid, an eternity has become, as a 73-year-old, barely a moment.

With this in mind, I have oft-pondered the fickle nature of time and the way we preceive it.

The older we get, the faster time seems to pass -- but only as we look back. In the moment, its speed of passage appears unchanged.

How can that be?

Some suggest that it's because our brains are getting full so there is no space to keep comprehensive memories of what has happened in the recent past. A lack of such memories equates to a perceived faster passage of time, in hindsight.

Others have suggested that our own internal clock slows with age so we simply don't get as many internal "ticks" in a given period of time as a younger person might -- but if that were the case then surely we'd also perceive things as speeding up in real-time during the moment.

It's when you ponder this situation that you realise that perhaps time itself is simply an artificial mechanism that allows us to make sense of the universe around us.

To quote Doctor Who: "Time is just the universe's way of stopping everything from happening at once".

Very smart people with the word "physicist" in their titles believe that all moments in time exist simultaneously. That is to say that the past still exists, the present exists and, even though we have not yet experienced it, the future already exists. Our perception of time is simply a case of sensing displacement along an already existing timeline.

Does this mean that time-travel is possible?

Most likely - yes.

However, since everything that has happened, is happening or will happen already has then to travel back or forward in time would serve no purpose. If you went back to 1960 you would not know you had done so because you would only have the same memories as you did back then so you wouldn't know that you'd just come from a future point on the timeline.

You could rewind but you'd be unaware of the fact and events would play out exactly as they had done before -- because they're determined by the timeline.

Likewise, if you travelled forward in time you would age and if you went too far, you would die.

If you stop and think about it, we're already time travelers -- moving forward at the rate of one second per second.

It may be that this is not the first time I've sat here and typed this column at 3am on a Tuesday Morning in February -- but I will never know that.

The catalyst for today's column was this BBC article on time perception which I found rather interesting -- perhaps you will too.

Carpe Diem folks!

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