What Time Is It?

I've been thinking about time again.  Yeah, I know there are theoretical physicists getting paid to ponder the same thing - what is time? - but that shouldn't keep me from thinking about it any more than the existence of NASCAR drivers should keep me from getting behind the wheel of my truck.  They're professionals, and they run their race very well, but they can't get me where I need to go, that's my job.

As Einstein demonstrated, space and time are connected, the same fabric.  It's where we get the concept of spacetime.  And we are embedded in spacetime, all four dimensions of it.  Which is why, I think, we experience time as a one-way arrow.  In order to step outside of time, we'd have to be able to experience a fifth dimension which would allow us a separate perspective on our original four.
    Think of it in terms of Flatland, a hypothetical two-dimensional world.  The Flatlanders have forward and back, and left and right, but they do not have up and down.  They can't even conceive of up and down, since that's a third dimension and they have only two.  Everything they do is constrained to those two dimensions, and even if they were somehow transported through a third dimension they'd never know it, since they can't perceive it.

Same thing with us and time.  It's a fourth dimension, but we're stuck in it like it's 4-D flypaper, nothing we can do to get out of it.  It's not only all we know, it's all we can know.

There's a very good question about time travel:  If time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers?  Once time travel is invented, no matter how far in the future, every era would be lousy with time tourists, because every moment in time would essentially be 'now.'  Since we don't see any time travelers, ipso facto, time travel must not be possible.
   But I put this to you:  if time travel is possible, it's only possible through a fifth dimension.  And since we can't perceive that fifth dimension, we can't perceive any time travelers, who must, of necessity, be five-dimensional beings.  So maybe there are time travelers all around us right now.  We'd never know it, just like Flatlanders could never know us higher-dimensional beings.

Which brings us to another notion about time.  We experience time as a linear flow, but if there is a fifth dimension outside of our four familiar dimensions of spacetime, wouldn't someone in that fifth dimension be able to see all of time?  To them, wouldn't time be just another dimension they could move along, forward or backward or sideways or what have you?  Furthermore, wouldn't that mean that time - though we experience it linearly - is actually all happening at once?  Is every moment in time really lined up in order like a huge card catalog* we leaf through from front to back because we have to by virtue of our four-dimensionality?

I think the notion of there being no real 'now,' just a card-catalog moment we experience as now is both disturbing and poetic.  It's like we live each moment like it's a frame of movie film, one at a time, one after the other. 
    Which has all sorts of implications for the notion of free will.  But that's another sleepless night lying in bed.


* kids, a card catalog is what libraries used to keep track of their books in the days before computers did everything for us.

How I Know I'm Getting Older

It's inevitable, time marches on for all of us. At least until I figure out what time is and how to stop it, at least for me.* Until then, though, I must recognize what is happening to me and deal with it accordingly.
   How I Know I'm Getting Older: I ask questions I never would have before.
   For example, construction crews have been putting in a sidewalk along a stretch of road just outside my subdivision. Back before there were houses here this part of town was pasture land complete with cows and not much else. No need for sidewalks. But now there are kids and schools and a big church which I'm never going to visit and sidewalks are a must.
   The construction has been going on for a month or so, they take a two days to clear the land and fit the forms, another day to pour the cement and another day to spread topsoil and plant grass. It's a system. And today they were working away by 8 AM, with the beeping and the scraping and the grinding and the blocking traffic. They're at a part of the road I can see from my front door, so I was watching them.
   Do you know what popped into my head? Not a thought about how hot it must be for these guys, or how glad I am that I don't do that kind of work, or a marvel at the exactness of the engineering that has to go into something as mundane as a sidewalk, or even how thirsty those guys must get even at 10 in the morning. None of that crossed my mind. As I stood at my front door and gazed over the cow pasture at the guy whipping around in the Bobcat and the guy with the hand-held Stop sign, I could only think of one thing.
   How much do they pay those guys to work on a Saturday?
   When I realized what I was thinking I ran to the mirror, wondering if liver spots and deep wrinkles had suddenly marred my flawless complexion. I mean, how old-man can you possibly get? How much do they get paid for Saturdays? What is wrong with me? I know that I'm becoming a geezer far before my time, but I had absolutely no idea how bad it had gotten. Next thing you know I'll be out there shaking a fist at them for blocking a lane of traffic. My lane of traffic.
   How am I gonna stop this? I don't want to wear jumpsuits or drive a huge American land yacht or wear black shoes and black socks as I mow the lawn. I want to be me. Me now, not me in thirty years.
   There's got to be a way to avoid this. Time machine... that's it... I'll invent a time machine. How hard could it be?



* insert super-villain laugh here

The Reason I Don't Own A House

In my life I've done more than my share of home maintenance and I don't even own a home. It's how I made a living into my college years and a few beyond. I've always considered buildings to be permanent. Cars wear out, refrigerators go on the fritz, jackets get holes at the elbows. But buildings were special. My elementary school might not have been St. Peter's, but it was always around, right where it had always been.
   But as I've been walking around the Miracle Mile district I've seen that buildings are as impermanent as everything else, it's just that their depreciation schedule is a little longer.
   I see a Shakey's that's been shuttered, a vacant building that clearly used to be an upscale department store, art deco office buildings and theaters sitting empty, their gold trim now faded. What was once clearly a walkable neighborhood is now a district for day residents, commuters like me who get the hell out as fast as they can at the end of the day. Everything used to be something else. And everything is slowly fading away.
   I remember when Windsor Park Mall was under construction. My friends and I would ride our bikes to look at the huge hole in the ground. Its grand opening was a huge event, klieg lights, balloons, media coverage, the whole magilla. It was the hang out when I was in high school. Ten years later it was in decline, and twenty years later it was closed. Shuttered and left for the rats and cockroaches. In my lifetime I've seen a huge structure born, descend into middle age, and die.
   This is a long way around to saying that I don't own a home because I'd rather not fight the inevitable decay. At least not right now. Houses need a lot of maintenance, and all the effort needed to fight the breakdown is really just trying to sweep the tide back with a broom. I'd rather live in my apartment, with no working elevator, with termites, with central heating that isn't hot and cooling that isn't cool because it's somebody else's responsibility to get it fixed.
   Plus, now that I'm working, I'm not home most of the day anyway.

COMMUTE: there - 38 minutes back - 46 minutes to my fencing lesson
CONTRACT COUNTDOWN: 75 days

More From The World Of Work

First, let me say that the work itself is not bad, it's something I can do and it's something I'm good at. And the people seem nice too, at least after 3 days on the job. But the nice might be part of the problem.
   I'm gonna get fat. Okay, fatter, but you know what I mean. The HR lady has candy. Lots of candy. The developers have snacks. And today someone who works remotely was in the office and they bought pies. I'm going to have to develop much, much, much stronger willpower. I don't want to be worthless and weak. But for God's sake, it was free pie...
   And I'm tired now. Not bone tired, not up-for-three-days tired, but more tired than I have been in quite a while. It's getting me down.


COMMUTE: there - 35 minutes back - 40 minutes
CONTRACT COUNTDOWN: 87 days

Y2 Crazy

A friend of mine reminded me that this past New Year's Eve marked ten years since the Y2K insanity. Ten years... how time flies. Seems like it was only yesterday.
   What was I doing? Glad you asked.
   I had started a new job in February of 1999. Being the new guy, and seeing as how shit flows downhill, I got to be our department's Y2K compliance guy. Wheeee!
   At the time the term Y2K hadn't quite taken hold, that really happened over the summer when clueless media finally got in on the panic. Since the company I worked for had mainframes, and since they knew five years before they were going to have a problem, they'd already come up with their own term, Change of Century. Y2K vs. CoC. You can see the reason Y2K won out.
   Anyway, I spent about half my time from March until December documenting in detail exactly why going to a 4-digit year wasn't going to have an effect on any of our systems. I talked to software vendors, I talked to hardware vendors, I talked to programmers, I talked to administrators, I got piles and piles of supporting documentation from everybody under the sun.
   I even spent quite a while devising my own tests and verifications for systems that other people had already tested and verified. Why? Because my manager wanted it. Why did he want it? Because his manager wanted it, and so on up the line. In an amazing spasm of incompetence and insecurity, our senior management decided not to accept the results of tests anyone else performed outside the company. We had to verify the operation ourselves. Twice. Several times I spent an 'executive hour' (fifty minutes) going over my test results with a VP who clearly had no idea what I was talking about. He just wanted to be able to tell his boss he'd heard it for himself, in person.
   Fast forward to New Year's Eve, 1999. I had to be at work. Yup, despite the three-foot stack of proof I had that there would be absolutely no problem with any system I or my team touched, used, or breathed on, I had to be in the building along with about 500 other unfortunates. 'Just in case.' Just in case what they never said.
   We counted down the minutes in a large meeting hall, where they plied us with candy and caffeine. When I say I would rather have been anywhere else I really mean it. It would have been less punishment to be snuggled up to a huge, hairy murderer in prison. But I don't have that kind of luck.
   Three... Two... One...
   Everybody waited, as if the carpet were going to roll up and the ceiling would collapse. Nothing happened. The lights didn't go out, no planes fell from the sky, there was no more panic or looting than is usual for New Year's Eve. A big, fat non-event. And I wasted it being at work. I went back to my desk, did about 45 minutes of tests to verify - AGAIN - that I hadn't been lying with all the other tests I did needlessly, and then I went home.

Later that night I got a call from a severely drunk friend of mine who needed a ride home. He was so intoxicated that he fell asleep against the windows of my new truck, leaving nose and eyelash prints on the glass. Even that was more fun than what I'd been doing.

Bent Time

Here's something that's bothered me for a while, not in the 'keep you up at night' kind of way, but in the 'stub your toe' kind of way. That's the kind of bothered where you don't really notice it until you think about it, and then it bothers you constantly for a little while then goes away. And then you'll think about it again and it'll get you stirred up all over again.
   Why hasn't anyone explained to me the 'bent time' part of bent spacetime?
   Spacetime is the prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that gravity is a byproduct of massive objects bending spacetime. All of the examples I've ever read about or seen on TV discuss gravitational lensing, either from galaxies or our own sun, and as far as I can tell these examples only show bent space. That is, you can see multiples of the same star appearing multiple times around a distant galaxy (lensing), or you can see how our sun bends the light from stars behind it, making them appear to change positions in the sky. On TV shows they always roll a ball across a net to show the reticulated distortions in the square grid, using that as an analogy of the sun making a dent in spacetime that the earth has fallen into. Space.
   But what about bent time? I never hear explanations of how time is also bent.
   If massive objects can bend light in space, and if spacetime is the combination of 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, then shouldn't a bend in spacetime not only affect position (x, y, and z axes), but shouldn't it also affect time? And what does that mean? If our sun distorts the apparent position of a star behind it, then does that mean we see that light before or after we otherwise would if the sun weren't there? And what are the implications for that? We already know using atomic clocks that relativistic effects are measurable for human beings, how does bent time affect us?
   I don't have any answers on this one, only questions. I think physicists are short-changing us when they explain general relativity if they leave bent time out of 'bent spacetime.'
   This is the long way around to saying 'I want my time machine, you bastards.'

Slow Down

Last week, out of the blue, I decided I needed to get my wrist watches running again. I have a few, but one is from a grabber machine at Dave and Buster's and one has Ren and Stimpy on the face (remember them?). The ones I wanted to get running again are my two nice ones, with worn and broken wrist bands and hands that haven't moved in years. So I took them up the street and got new batteries and new bands, and $60 later I have two working wrist watches.
   But when I thought about it, I had no idea why I suddenly wanted to get my watches repaired.
   It's been years since I've worn one, literally. I remember that I stopped wearing a watch because everything around me had a clock, the computer at work, my truck, my cell phone, the cable box, every receipt from every store. I didn't need a watch to tell me the time because time was all around me, all day every day.
   And then it hit me, that's why I decided to wear a watch again. Everything around me tells me the time, demands that I know the time of day, all day every day. If I look at my cell phone, it tells me the time is exactly 8:48. No guesswork, no interpretation. Cell phones, computers, cable boxes, they're all synchronized with the national clock in Colorado every night, so they're spot-on accurate almost all the time. To the millisecond.
   My wrist watches are analog, sweeping hands on a round dial, not blocky digital numbers on a square readout. With a wrist watch, I can decide for myself what time it is. If the big hand is near the 10, it's about ten before the hour. But it might be a little before that, it might be a little after that. If the battery is running low, the big hand might be lagging well behind the 'actual' time. And I'm cool with that.
   I'm the last guy to get all freaky and New Age - I've ranted about that before - but maybe people should divorce themselves from the clock, at least for a little while. Let the digital age slip away, embrace analog again. Get back to wrist watches, to pencil and paper, to vinyl records, to a good book on real paper. Maybe talk to your family a little bit, see what they're all about, instead of watching too much TV and taking a pill to go to sleep.