Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock
struck one, the mouse ran down, Hickory dickory dock.
Time has always struck us, moved us, grown us, and killed
us. Time keeps on moving. Beyond the hassles of daily life, and beyond any
direct interaction.
How did we come to know about time?
Days and nights were passing and our curious humanoid brains
started observing that they ate, slept at a particular cycle of days and nights
and that "how long" could measure on the basis of days and nights.
Then they saw seasons repeated too. Then stars were dancing as well with the
same repeated movements.
Hence we started measuring time by looking at stars. The way
they circled around in the sky, night after night and compared to their
movement, the way Sun moved. Once we
became more skillful, we made clocks that were all synced against one another
around the world. But no clock in this world is referenced to any absolute
instance of time. Mercury, Quartz and now Cesium clocks all maintain the time
with a minute fraction of error in their vibrations. That's how we refer time.
How does time flow?
I had this vision, an imagination. We are all moving
relative to each other and thus our time is relative to each other. The comets
are flying by, the moon, the planets, the kuiper belt and oort cloud, solar
systems against each other all of their time relative to each other. It is like
a glutinous stream, but unlike the stream nobody knows how time flows. We are
all stuck in a boat without any absolute reference, and we are travelling arbitrarily
(if the direction is considered away from each other in a 3D world after the
big bang, i think time can be considered something that is way bigger than
that)
So if it flows can it be slowed down or fasten up?
What special relativity tells us is that as you start moving
towards the relative speed of light against another object, you can slow down
your time compared to his clock.
It could be said that the "speed of time" is c.
For two objects that are at rest relative to one another, time progresses at
the same rate for both. If one object accelerates to some arbitrary speed, the
passage of time for that object (as viewed by the other object) will decrease.
This decrease is a function of whatever fraction of light speed the first
object is traveling.
If you look at time as traveling by at light speed, you can
say that the accelerating object is "catching up" to time. If this
object were ever to actually reach the speed of light, time would cease to move
for that object. It could be argued that the object has accelerated until it
was synchronized with a particular moment, and is not traveling parallel with
that moment.
That moment is when the time will cease to exist. Suddenly
no one will grow any older. What sort of world will that be where time is no
more a constraint. Will we be someone like Cooper who went into a black hole and got stuck in a time warped higher dimensional
world? But one thing is for sure, whether to finish your homework, or go to work, you will never be late.
Hickory dickory dock.
Wandered-Lost-Crazy
(P.S. Food for Thought: Can we have resistors, capacitors, inductors of time?)
