Curiosities #3

There are many people who tell us that time is a human construct.  I absolutely agree – except I am convinced that, just occasionally, Time choses to tease us!

You can pretty much guarantee that when you are working to a deadline, that time will run waaayyyy faster than normal.  And sometimes, when life is really boring, and you just want to get to that point in your day when you can sit down, put your feet up and go to sleep, Time plods forward as if it is wearing heavy lead boots.

The times that I find absolutely fascinating are those time-slips that are just too weird to be real.  Like the time you hop in the car and you know the journey takes you 40 minutes on a good clear road because you do it every week.  You glance at the clock and it tells you it’s 2.00pm and you set off – and arrive at your destination a 2.23pm. 
WHAT!!!  How did that happen?  And you worry that maybe you were abducted by aliens and brought back further along the road than you should have been.  I know how weird that is.  It happens frequently to me.  In fact, I even make a game of it now. 

Of course, I am absolutely no expert and you may have a much better handle on this than me, but I am pretty sure that ancient humans must have broken up their lives into the seasons, night and day, hungry and not hungry.  I’ve heard it said that the most important inventions ever were fire and the wheel.  I think that time has been omitted from that list because we never really give a thought to how it came about that someone first conceived of the idea and then invented a way to measure time; and how these really incredibly intelligent ancients managed to work it all out without computers!

The earliest clock ever found was from the 14^th century BCE and is attributed to the ancient Egyptians – or the Babylonians.  Or maybe the Chinese.  It appears that the jury is out, but.. WOW.  How much work would it have taken to work everything out and then build a water clock (or mercury in the case of the Chinese) that keeps track of all your maths? 

Apparently the Babylonians used a counting system ranged in measurements of 60 which is why we work on a system where the hours are split into divisions of 60 minutes and 60 seconds.   And, we are still using that system three and a half thousands years later!  So it’s not all that surprising to realise just how much it rules our lives.

The current average lifespan is 29,000 days and as I write this I have lived 25,064 days on this earth which means that the clock is ticking and time is now not only slippery but it appears as if I might be on the home-straight!  But this gives me a perspective on time that almost all of us will come across at some point, especially as we get older.  Time really is a matter of perspective.

Just think: when you were 5 years old, 5 years represented your entire life.
When you were 10 years old, looking back over 5 years represented half your life. 

When we get to 50, looking back on the previous 5 years is only a fraction of our time here on Earth and if we get to the ripe old age of 100 years or more, then 5 years is a mere blip! Time definitely does speed up as we get older, especially when we look at how much time has passed in our lives.

When people say that time is ‘just a human construction’, I get the feeling that they are implying that there is something not quite right about how humans observe time.    After all, the flora and fauna of this planet seem to get along quite well without observing this.  Except they do.  They know light and dark, hungry and not hungry, and they observe the seasons.  Just like humans did before we invented the three things that made the biggest difference in our future as a species:  Fire, the Wheel and Time.

And I for one, am really glad that we did.