Being and Time

Note 1: this title is a blatant theft of Martin Heidegger.
Note 2: If you haven't already, definitely scroll down to read the other posts from today.

As I sit in the apartment tonight, waiting for a thunderstorm that at the most will produce armageddon and at the least will drop an inch (an inch I say!) of rain, I find myself ruminating upon the fascinating subject that is time. I have often said that physics is my favorite of the sciences. Not in the sense that I want to be a physicist, but more in sense that I find it fascinating "that" it works as opposed to "how" it works.

I am enamored with the concept of time for many reasons, and that is not simply referring to my compulsive punctuality. There is much to be taken with: time is unique in that it is a both a physical construct and a philosophical one. Time is a immutable and unstoppable yet at the same time untouchable, invisible, hidden from our senses. Our bodies can feel it's effects but not "it." Man has built "civilization" through his mastery of the environment. Through mental faculty he has, for better or worse, bent much of the Earth to his will. He has visited the heavens and even built monuments that he could still see from way up there. He has damned rivers, exterminated entire species, and without really even trying he's melting the polar ice caps. But for all of his power to create and destroy, man cannot touch time. Indeed time is the one thing that destroys man that man is absolutely powerless against. We can build homes to shut out the winter cold, transport water hundreds of miles to quench thirst, fight cancer with drugs and techniques, and even vanquish predators with sophistocated weaponry ... but we cannot halt the breakdown of each and every one of our constituent cells as time passes. We can define time, we can create calendars and clocks to "mark" time, but in the end it remains unchanged.

More intriguingly, time is a series of paradoxes. It is both finite yet infinite, concrete but abstract. It is destructive but without intention. It brings change but changes nothing in and of itself. From our standpoint time seems quite absolute - there is a past that is gone forever, a present that is here and now, and a future that has not yet come. As far as our everyday lives are concerned time is one infinite rail line and it just so happens we can only travel in one direction. We have not, as of yet, invented a time machine.

As far as physicists are concerned, however, time is not absolute. Einstein gained a great deal of fame by arguing that time was in fact relative - that time itself varied based upon one's frame of reference (really, one's speed). Time slows, Einstein argued, as one nears the speed of light, and actually stops for a person traveling at that speed. This is quite relevant to physicists in theory, but not so much to us in practice - the fastest any (unmanned) man-made object has ever traveled is approximately 150,000 miles per hour, while light travels at over 186,000 miles ... per second. Also largely irrelevant to our lives, but no less interesting, is Einstein's believe that all time is concurrent; that future, past, and present are each an illusion masking a single existence. I'm no physicist, but to continue my train analogy: it would no longer be one infinite track but instead an infinite number of finite tracks, each representing one moment of existence.

That scientific foray - in which I presented the bare minimum (aka the extent of my understanding) - was merely to demonstrate that there is a difference between time as a concept and how we experience that time. I suppose this could have been achieved just as easily through the knowledge that for an individual human being 80 years is a long time but for the structure of the universe it is barely a blip. Better yet, we could look at how relative each human being's experience of time is. My rational brain ensures that I know, as we all know, that the units we have crafted to mark time (second/minute/hour) are exactly equivalent now to what they were 10 years ago. Yet now, at 26, I subjectively experience that time is moving faster than it did when I was 16, and it may feel even faster when I'm 36.

Although I've meandered near and far in this piece, I suppose it's really the human experience of time that I'm after. In Meet Joe Black, Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins), presented with the blunt imminence of his own mortality, pines, "Sixty-five years, don't they go by in a blink." Although I'm not yet 65, and hopefully not on death's door, I sympathize with the thought. There are mornings I wake up and think: 26 years. How did I get here?

To close the circle I created far up above, the qualities that make time fascinating (immutable, indestructible, unstoppable) also make it terrifying. Today is March 23, 2009 and after today there will never again be another. I was born on October 7, 1982 and although that day might be the most important of my individual life I will never re-experience it. I know there will be a October 7, 2012, ostensibly my 30th birthday, whether I'm there to see it or not. Yes, in a way a date is arbitrary, simply man's symbol placed upon the the abstract. Even so, it's a jarring finality. Even for those of us who live to be 110, we know that our time on earth is finite. In that sense not only is a particular day an experience we'll never have again, but it's also sand through an hourglass that only works in one direction.