Fall, the ticking of time
Tisdale - Friday,September 28, 2012
As each of us progressively ages, the passage of each season seems to be in such a hurry. Gosh, it seems like only last week it was late spring, where did summer go and look, look this is definitely fall! This weekend, one of the movies that has caught people's attention stars Bruce Willis, who goes back in time, some forty years to tell himself about the mistakes that he can avoid, the movie is called "Looper" and indeed, the author is not doing a science fiction piece about time travel, but is concentrating on the idea, that if you had the opportunity to do things over, would that be a good thing. This sounds like good subject matter for a movie and seems worth of exploration. By the way this is not a recommendation to see the movie, because I talked to someone who saw it tonight and he said it was just "so so" as it moved a little slow and could have been cleaned up a whole lot in the editing suite. That is of course an interesting take on a movie about how one might improve one's life with a little editing.
Time travel has fascinated us all and science fiction stories of all kinds abound with various takes on this "what if" concept. Almost everyone has seen at least one or more episodes of Star Trek dealing with the idea, as the writers for the different series and the movies, have all had a shot at using time travel as a means to explore, "what if!"
Time travel is scientifically just a fantasy, or is it? The whole concept of time is one of the pillars of reality, yet it is not fixed in physics, or philosophy. Einstein devoted considerable attention to the concept of time as he determined, that it is theoretically impossible to exceed the speed of light. He and other scientists have determined, that as an object approaches this high velocity, time would become distorted and where the object to reach that speed, time itself would stop and at that moment, the object would be in all places in the universe at that infinite moment. For science fiction writers, that whole idea needed a push, for indeed that would automatically mean, that if you exceeded the speed of light, time would run backward. It is not just theory, atomic clocks accelerated into earth orbit and returned to the planet show a deviation in their time as speed and time appear to be linked in reality, not just in fiction.
Stephen Hawking, who explored the physics and probability of “black holes” refers to the whole issue of time being dramatically shifted by both light and acceleration which or course is what got Einstein mulling over the whole problem in the first place.
But, what about you and me? Is it practical, or even worthy of consideration, that we let our minds entertain the concept of time? In my first paragraph of this piece, I pointed out the apparent oddity, that as we age, the phenomena of time, seems to be compressed. There are a number of reasons why this is apparent, time may not really be speeding up as we grow older, but our experience, our passage through life and the times we have lived, is locked into our memory and just as you read a book for the second, or third time, so it is, that as each year cycles by and you know what to expect and you are not totally surprised at a regular event, but surprised as its seeming premature arrival.
It is worth discussing how our brain and its remarkable collection of systems, processes and sensors deal with time. As near as we can tell, each of us has a system of counting, that is demonstrably accurate. Notice how many people do not wear watches and yet remain completely aware of the time of the day or night, right down to a minute or two. Most likely, we all have a little internal clock, that is available under most circumstances, to count away the passage of seconds. This process gets messed up seriously when one is ill, or affected by medication, or alcohol, even stress and anxiety can cause a time reckoning outage, since if the brain and its processors are busy, that function is turned off to deal with other matters. This is one of the main reasons, worrying is just a waste of energy, as it uses up brain power and constricts proper brain function.
Just to move you a little further through this complex brain problem, think about this. If a person does not get enough sleep, through illness, stress, emotional upset, pain, or medication, that causes deep umbra sleep, that person invariably becomes irritable and some, down right cranky. Here is what is going on.
You can only remember a limited amount of things in your short term memory, perhaps as little as twenty hours or so. At that point, you need to sleep, so that you will dream. The dream event is actually the data in short term memory being evaluated, sorted and stored to long term memory. Interrupt the dream process and you have a full short term memory reaching its capacity. At about 72 hours the system breaks down and while still awake, the dream process will begin to take place and that person experiences hallucinations and staying awake beyond, that can cause damage to the nervous system.
Consider a mother of a colicy baby. The child will not sleep, but cries and the mother tries everything she knows to give her baby comfort. After a day or two of this, she is pretty much wore out, she is sleep deprived, her short term memory overloaded because the intermittent sleep prevented her from dreaming and if her spouse pitches in to help, she might get some relief, but a really troubled colicy baby can wear them both out. They will be irritable and their bundle of joy has become a bundle of torment. By the way if this happens to you, be aware of the need for sleep and try out the clothes drier. Put the child's sleeping rig on the drier, turn it on and there is a good chance the crying might stop.
During a head on collision in 1969, I watched the oncoming car, I saw the hood slowly crumple, the windshield billow outward from the impact of my wife on it and felt the steering wheel drive into my chest, the front seat broke off and headed forward, then there was silence as my wife came off the windshield. That all happened in that split second giving me time to think about the destruction of the brand new battery my father had had installed in the car that was only hours old to us. But, the question I ask, is that really what happened? Did time slow down, did my life really pass in front of my eyes? No, I don't think it did. I think what happened, is that since the event was so powerful, my short term memory kept every detail and when it was passed to long term memory, nothing was skimmed over, it was all embedded in memory to be relived time after time, after time. The review process, was in fact the process of my life flashing before my eyes. By the way, my wife suffered a mild concussion and I was completely uninjured. That car was fitted with seat belts, I had sore ribs but no injuries.
So does time stand still, probably not, only your reflection on a moment of time makes it seem to slow. Just as the terror of an inverted spin in a light aircraft seems to go on and on far longer then the few seconds that actually elapse, but that is only because some moments are more important than others and our memory system takes that into account.
So here it is, the fall of 2012, the environmental triggers that produce the change of colour in the trees are not random. From year to year, those factors in the temperate climate zone in which we live, are just as regular as "clock work". Within a few days, at each latitude the amount of light and the temperature, flip the life switch in the trees, from function, to shut down. Spring is a little more variable then fall, but only plus, or minus a week each way. Climate change is so gradual, that only in alpine and arctic locations will the variations brought about by warming, actually move the change of seasons by very much.
The pictures on this page were taken this morning and three were taken early this week. The positive warmth of the sun makes these images even better, I wonder if the warm sun slows time down, hmmm, I will have to think about that.
