The Hurrier I Go…

“Oh dear I’m behinder again!”

The White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not a master of time management despite looking at his pocket watch every three seconds or so. I suspect part of the reason he was always late was his OCD impulse to check the time and confirm that, yes, he indeed was late.

Whoever said something like “a plague on all your houses” must have been cursing humanity with time because, when you take time to think about it, it is indeed a sort of curse upon us. (Well, to be honest, no one ever said “a plague on all your houses.” Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet says “a plague on both your houses” after he’s mortally wounded. And I’m sure he was wanting to have more time at the moment rather than laying a big whammy on the world.)

Time is an elusive sometimes annoying sometimes enjoyable concept. At times we have too much of it. At others we have too little. But what is time (and where does it tend bar my dad would say)? You can read about it endlessly. Time is the fourth dimension. Time is the perception of past, present, and future. Time is a measurement of motion and forces. Time is a fundamental element of the universe. Time is a figment of our imagination. In a seeming crossover moment, Einstein famously said that “people like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present, and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Of course, Albert was not speaking metaphorically or philosophically. He was saying that, in his view, the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. In his quote, he was referring to Minkowski’s “block universe,” a concept that indeed underlies a philosophy: eternalism. In eternalism, “all points in time are equally ‘real,’ as opposed to the presentist idea that only the present is real.” This means, according (I think) to the relativity of simultaneity, that everything past, present, and future is happening now and will always be happening now.

Eureka! I have just proven that the more you think about things the more confusing they become. To paraphrase the WR, “the thinkier I am, the confuseder I get.” (Ironically, this realization suddenly makes the tactics of politics “perfectly clear.”)

I have now spent more than an hour on this topic. Time to move on to more productive things. I can always come back to this tomorrow…or can I? Depending on how you look at it, tomorrow either never comes or is only a day away. I guess I will find out when I wake up in the morning. No, wait. I’ve already done that. I wonder what I found out when I did. If you see me then, let me know now. Thanks.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings