What ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos’ Taught Me About Time and Life
Do we truly understand what time is?
The exact thing we squander, waste, kill, spend, save is the same thing we do not understand. We know what it is, yet we never know how it looks like. We carry its messenger along with us in our watches and phones, yet we never questioned its existence.
I am referring to time.
Time is one unique attribute in our lives. It has a string of accolades under its belt.
- It is the 4th dimension in theoretical physics.
- It governs our perspectives of finance through the time value of money.
- Isaac Newton invented calculus to compute the movement of celestial bodies over time.
Imagine time as a content contributor with 10 top writer badges, if you will.
But what is it, exactly? Are there constituents of time similar to how water is expressed as a molecule?
Brian Greene, the author of The Fabric of The Cosmos, has this poetic description of time.
A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn’t age.
Huh?
Do We Know What Time Is?
I am clueless about time.
Maybe I am not smart enough to articulate it. Would the top minds in natural science have a better explanation?
Ask physicists what time actually is, and the answer might shock you: they have no idea. Even more surprising, the deep sense we have of time passing from present to past may be nothing more than an illusion. How can our understanding of something so familiar be so wrong? — Brian Greene, The Illusion of Time.
Ask physicists what time is, and we enter the realm of science fiction. Okay, not too helpful.
Maybe we have to start from the attributes of time to understand what it is.
The Attributes of Time
Brian Greene attributed Chapter 6 of The Fabric of The Cosmos to an investigation of time. This chapter is titled Chance and the Arrow.
He posed the following question:
“Does time have an arrow?” … The laws of physics apply moving both forward in time and backward in time. Such a law is called time-reversal symmetry. One of the major subjects of this chapter is entropy. — Brian Greene
Our life experience tells us that time, a temporal dimension of life, marches ruthlessly in one direction towards the future. Heading back to our past is impossible.
This is unlike spatial dimensions (left-right, up-down, forward-backwards), where we can literally and figuratively move backwards.
Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity budgets for symmetry of movement across the dimension of time. Maybe, we need technology to catch up to get back to our Good Old Days.
Fascinating.
I am not too sure if I want to re-live moments of humiliation or disappointment from my past. However, I am willing to time-travel backwards if I get to choose when I can return to.
If.
Our Experience of Time and Life is Independent of The Arrow of Time
When it comes to our utility of time, velocity matters. Speed does not.
Velocity has a directional vector. It refers to how fast we are running in THAT direction. Speed has no orientation. It refers to how fast we run, period. It is a metric to measure how much movement is generated by clueless chickens.
Bill Copeland’s quote about goals applies equally well to our experience of time:
The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.
From that perspective, we can be busy while achieving absolutely nothing. Scary, but true.
That is why how we tie our value judgments to time without having to understand it. At this juncture, Life and Physics part ways.
When we engage more with our work, self-improvement programs — Time flies. When we sit around, whimpering, decaying our souls away — Time grinds to a halt. Time, on the other hand, ticks away.
For us, our use of time trumps our understanding of it.
Summary
We do not understand the concept we have invented. Time, a dimension in our world, presents itself in our watches, smartphones, personal finance, calculus, and in all ways possible.
What we do with it, not what it is, matters.
Time is an asset we are born with. As cliché as it sounds, time deposits 86,400 seconds in our life at the start of the day.
We can spend 86,400 seconds figuring out what it is, or we can use these seconds to pursue our goals, achieving them before we expire biologically.
How we utilize time to our benefit is our choice.
Aldric
As a content contributor, I write my observations from daily life and my business exposure because our life experience is the bedrock of our unique perspectives.
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