Sunday, December 02, 2007

Fuck... is it the end of the year already???

Is it me or is the time just flying by?
I mean I've heard it already, how when you are a little child because you haven't lived that many days up to that point, a day relatively seems long, where as when you are my age, - of a certain age, because you are comparing it to a longer phase of life, it just seem much shorter.

1 day for a 5 year old = 1/1825 of his life
where as 1 day for a 30 year old is 6 times faster..
which means 1 hour feels like 10 minutes. a week feels like a day, and birthdays just come like every second month or something!

And seriously, this is becoming ridiculous!
I am getting to the point where before I get used to writing down a year, 2007 for example, it passes, and I have to get used to writing down a new year!

I can't imagine what life will be when I am sixty... it will be twice as fast as now, which means, it will be literally, after I eat breakfast it will be dinner time, and well celebrating birthdays will feel a bit redundant.

Anyhow, for me, after the speed of life increase to a point where I can't control, I have started to keep my expectations of what I can do in a given day abit low. I mean like I feel like to wake up take a shower brush teeth take a dump and have three meals, get back in bed seems like an achievement on its own given the short time we have to do all of this! I mean if I manage to do anything on top of this, like floss for example, that day has been productive. No, I don't feel like I am a lazy person, who dilly dally all day. On the contrary, I am swift and agile- well I thought to be like that but these days, I don't know.

Looking around a bit on this idea of time and age, I realized that it isn't a new thing at all.(of course)
Well we have first of all, the all so famous relativity of time by Mr One Stone.... Einstein.
In his theory of General Relativity and more specifically Gravitational time dilation it is said that time pass at different rates in regions of different gravitational potential. Which means that we as adults being further away from earth than younglings, we feel that time passes much faster. (no just kidding) it is actually about if you were to be in a space ship which travels in the speed of light, what you perceive as a day will be like a year to the person left on earth because you are in that ultra super fast ship- and a different gravitational potential(here is a simple easy to understand description of this). So in these terms, when we are kids we are in space ships, which for them a minute feels like a hour for us. This is why kids move crazy fast and for us seem restless, since their lives are speed up 5 times more than what it is for us. But don't worry they all end up coming back to earth times eventually.

The psychological perception of time and its relativity to age has also been tested and proved by a group of researchers[this paper]. Through survey/experimental studies, they prove that the perception of the speed of time does indeed increase as you grow older. Also in addition to this, time to be speeding up as the Earth we live in gets older as well. In other words, we as in the people who live in current times, feel that time is much faster than people felt in the past.

Of course the validity of this argument and its methods are fully up to yous. But I would imagine you will not disagree with me on the point that time is flying by .. and well what do you know, there goes another five minutes of your life.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Greetings from Cologne - Phil (you know that brother)