Time

What is time ? Such an elementary question isn't it ? Time one thing that every human being on this planet share. I don't think there will be any language that doesn't have a word for time. We have an intuitive understanding of time as something that moves in one direction at an assumed uniform speed and we have no choice but to move forward with it. If you were to try and explain what is time more specifically, you would find it extremely hard because there is nothing else like it in our sphere of experience. Time is time, you don't have other words can break that down anymore.

In science till the time of Einstein and Lorentz, time was assumed an invariant and absolute quantity, meaning that it 'flowed' past at a uniform rate and which was shared by everyone. Think of a cosmic network of clocks with everyone or at each point in space, set to the same time and time moving forward at the same rate for everyone so that their clocks would agree at any point. This worked out well for a while until we started observing phenomena that disagreed with this simple idea of time like the interference pattern in Michelson Morley interferometer which questioned the idea of an absolute frame of reference.

Then relativity came into picture and we lost the grip on the simple idea of time. Einstein postulated through his two theories of Special and General Relativity that time is indeed not an invariant, it would pass at different rates for observers moving with respect to each other or observers in different gravitational fields. The only thing that remains the same for everyone (every observer to be precise) is the fact that they observe the same physical laws and the infamous 'c', the speed of light.

I have even read about a thing called 'Wheeler-Dewitt' equation which cannot reconcile the existence of time with the quantum nature of the universe (?) (from what I understand which is very little considering the involved mathematics :), but you can always look it up for yourself in Wikipedia) .

There has been a lot of stuff going on since, which I'm yet to learn/understand as a humble and recent student of physics with very limited knowledge.

This is the 'scientific time' , which still continues to fascinate and drive people to understand it more. There is a more humble aspect of time, the time which we perceive in our lifetimes.

The word 'life' owes most of its meaning to time. We associate life with something dynamic, something that is moving, evolving or degrading or doing something and for all of this we require time. For us, human beings time holds a much more personal and deep meaning and that comes from two things that we can't really avoid, life and death.

It is always short in supply and high in demand, for whining students like myself to the elected rulers of nations. We are born with a finite supply of it: we know we'll die one day and we approximately know how far that day is going to be from now. If you're really lucky you might live for a hundred years, but for most of us, we say goodbye to the world 70-80 years after we are born. Our existence is erased at that point. We or our consciousness doesn't exist anymore. Whatever wonderful machinery that made us these thinking machines capable of questioning the meaning of time, disintegrate into atoms and join back the cycles of the planet to be part of other things, perhaps a few molecules of water in the oceans or parts of a green tamarind tree :)

So how do we go about utilizing these finite amount of time we've got ? To top it off, you can't stop the flow. You have no choice but to utilize it in some way; you can't save it.

This is getting too long for a post and ironically I'm pressed for time :D so there shall be a 'Time 2' :)