Slipping Time on Keeps

by phil on Monday Nov 10, 2003 11:10 PM
Art

Sometimes I get nervous watching the time.. to watch the seconds progress one step at a time.

Sometimes I imagine every action of the earth taking place simultaneously at that second, the earth rotating a few milidegrees, somebody picking up a glass of water, a couple kissing, somebody getting ready to shoot.

Like clockwork, everything on earth moves synchronously to the same clock of time. We all, all billions of us, take a step at the same time, every second.

7*10^9 people holding hands simultaneously taking one step forward into time. Every second the earth etches a gazillion bits of new information into the irrevocable timeline.

And my heart stops for a second, worried that this fleet of elephants will trip up and explode. But they don't. Like clockwork, every action has a reaction and it all balances out, one second at a time.

Comments

teedeepee said on November 12, 2003 4:40 AM:

... and things get even more baffling when you consider that each of those 7*10^9 people take a step forward into their own relative spacetime... Making the walker age faster than the runner, the high-rise worker aging less than the basement worker... All common phenomenons that derive from basic relativity laws, invisible to the senses, but which are significant enough to offer mind-boggling perspectives when we consider that we do not step into time the same way as our neighbor. Still, the diktat of the clock ticking is as irrevocable as, say, taxes and death - and there is now way for anyone to tell that his/her time runs out at a different pace than anyone else's. Caught between pure mental subjectivity (an hour spent with a pretty girl flies by like a minute, a minute of pain seems to last an hour) and pure physical objectivity (the spacetime fabric is twisted by factors like gravity and speed), we humans all seem to be part of a universal journey around the clock.

That was another brilliant $0.02.