On the Clock

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí

As we close in on New Year's Eve, this may be a good time to talk about ... Time. It's an interesting concept, isn't it. Because concept it is: We can't see it, feel it, hear it, or anything-else it, and yet we know it's there, and it pretty much rules our lives. When he was 5, my son said, after some silence as we were driving somewhere, "We don't really know it's 1996 because we don't know when time started or when it will end. We've just agreed to call it 1996." Big thoughts for a little guy. There are lots of big guys studying time. CalTech astrophysicist Sean Carroll is one of them. In an interview, he paraphrased St. Augustine (354-430 AD) as saying, "I know what time is until you ask me for a definition about it, and then I can’t give it to you." Carroll himself explains it in terms of an arrow, the conditions of the Big Bang, entropy, and the theory of a multiverse: http://www.wired.com/2010/02/what-is-time/
   While he talks about the past, present, and future, it seems that even those might be only concepts and not so much a reality: http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/06/its-about-time.html
   And then, there's the impact of time on our everyday life. The same five minutes can seem like eternity or like the blink of an eye, depending on what you're doing. Some of our time is worth more to us than other time. If you're interested in finding out how much your spare time is worth to you, you might want to check this out: http://mentalfloss.com/article/72332/now-you-can-calculate-worth-your-spare-time
   P.S., Many consider painter Salvador Dalí to have been ahead of his time. His Persistence of Memory (above) is one of his most famous works, and yet there are many fascinating things most of us would be surprised to learn about it: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62725/15-things-you-didnt-know-about-persistence-memory