Trying to pin down the essence of time can be difficult for us to visualise because we reference so much of our lives by our current perception of it. But we can shake up that perception when we consider how we experience time differently when engaged in a pleasant activity as opposed to a boring or unpleasant one. And think how slowly time seemed to pass as children compared to our experience as (especially older) adults.
I also often wonder if the perception of time passing is the same for all creatures - could the single day life of a mayfly seem to it the equivalent of our roughly 80 years? How would an immortal jellyfish experience time after a few thousand years?
Einstein famously informed us that the passage of time depends upon the reference frame you are in and that of anything you observe. Two trains travelling on parallel tracks with one passenger observing through the window a ball dropping in a carriage of the opposite train, would see the object fall as if the ball was in their carriage, whereas a stationary observer on the platform would see the ball on a trajectory determined by the passing train's speed relative to the observer. A straight drop vs a diagonal line.
On Earth we have no sensation of the fact that our planet spins at 1000 mph or that it's travelling at 67,000 mph in its orbit around the sun. We are in the same 'relative train carriage' as our world.
So our experience of time may bear no relation to actual time and perhaps there's no such thing as 'actual' time outside of our perception of it. If that's the case, our universe could exist and not exist in the blink of an eye. Everything from the Big Bang to the formation of celestial bodies, through the soup of chemical reactions to the formation of living cells and the evolution that led to us, and everything to come, could be a mere flash of light in 'real time'.
If our brains slow down 'real time', events that appear separated throughout our lives may be almost (or even actually) simultaneous. Does that make us think differently about our lives, about evolution, or about our universe?
I also often wonder if the perception of time passing is the same for all creatures - could the single day life of a mayfly seem to it the equivalent of our roughly 80 years? How would an immortal jellyfish experience time after a few thousand years?
Einstein famously informed us that the passage of time depends upon the reference frame you are in and that of anything you observe. Two trains travelling on parallel tracks with one passenger observing through the window a ball dropping in a carriage of the opposite train, would see the object fall as if the ball was in their carriage, whereas a stationary observer on the platform would see the ball on a trajectory determined by the passing train's speed relative to the observer. A straight drop vs a diagonal line.
On Earth we have no sensation of the fact that our planet spins at 1000 mph or that it's travelling at 67,000 mph in its orbit around the sun. We are in the same 'relative train carriage' as our world.
So our experience of time may bear no relation to actual time and perhaps there's no such thing as 'actual' time outside of our perception of it. If that's the case, our universe could exist and not exist in the blink of an eye. Everything from the Big Bang to the formation of celestial bodies, through the soup of chemical reactions to the formation of living cells and the evolution that led to us, and everything to come, could be a mere flash of light in 'real time'.
If our brains slow down 'real time', events that appear separated throughout our lives may be almost (or even actually) simultaneous. Does that make us think differently about our lives, about evolution, or about our universe?