(ONE MAN'S ATTEMPT TO HELP THE WORLD UNDERSTAND THE VEXING QUESTIONS OF BIG SCIENCE, ONE BEER AT A TIME.)

To a child waiting for Christmas, time slows down to a crawl so slow that each tick of the clock seems to be a totally separate entity that can be held in the hand and examined.  Tick.  Tock.  Tick.  Tock.  To that child, time is vacant, empty, it contains nothing, it lasts forever, it never moves.

To a person reflexively glancing over their shoulder at a runaway car that is about to strike and kill them, so much activity is compressed into a single moment or series of moments, that it seems surreal, impossible.  Time becomes so full of itself that it wants to explode.  The last night of a condemned man, awaiting his date with death at dawn, speeds by with uncontrollable fury.

We have all heard vague examples of relativity but few of us care about it enough to attempt to grasp its true meaning. (To further confuse the issue, the interested reader is referred to Einstein’s Hammock #1.)  We hear stories of time travelers going off into space and traveling at the speed of light, only to return before they left.  We hear of space and time being “bent”.  We hear of lifetimes flashing before our eyes in an instant.  We hear of “freezing moments in time”.  But what are we to make of this?  What can we sketch on the back of a bar napkin at 1:30am when we are attempting to be at our brainy best? 

Let me offer a real-life example of the relativity of space and time.  It is something that I suspect we’ve all experienced, even if we don’t recognize it as such:

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You walk into a room with a large grandfather clock sitting in the corner.  It’s a fine old instrument made of brass and wood.  It is sturdy, reliable, well-tended.   You read the face and glance at your watch – the time appears to be correct.  It is exactly correct.

You can see the hands on the face of the clock: an hour hand, a minute hand and a second hand.  You look at them for a moment but nothing appears to be moving; nothing is making a sound.  The timing mechanism is powered by a large pendulum that swings freely behind a glass window in the body of the clock.  Unfortunately, your view of the pendulum is obstructed by a large, fat woman wearing an expensive red dress and a mink stole (I was so sure it would be spelled “stoll”) with a real mink wrapped around her shoulders – head firmly clasping tail with its teeth.  She is sweating slightly along her upper lip.  She smells strongly of peaches and lilacs and vaguely of lemon Pledge.  She is eating a muffin with dark blue berries and nuts that drop to the floor with each bite.  But this is more detail than you need so you shake that information from your mind and return to the clock.

You notice again that the clock does not appear to be running.  The second hand has not clicked, the pendulum has not ticked. (Although you can’t see it.)  “How odd,” you think to yourself.  You recall that the clock seemed to be running an hour ago when you last saw it. 

You wait and you wait some more.  Nothing.  Suddenly the clock ticks and the second hand clicks one place.  Then the clock ticks again, and then again and again – suddenly the clock is running... Tick.  Tock.  Tick.  Tock.

“How odd!” you think again.  “How odd that I should walk into the room just when the clock has stopped running and that it should start up again when I appear!”  You instinctively check yourself for force fields or time warps that may be clinging to your lapel like dandruff.  There are none.

How odd.

What happened here?

In our society we measure time in discrete parcels: seconds, minutes, hours,   years.  Each has a beginning and an end, and each is composed of an exact, measurable amount of “time”.  We stack them up end to end like the box cars of a train.  The longer the train, the more time that goes by, and vice versa. (Other societies measure time differently - as cycles or parallel realities – never beginning, never ending.  Looked at in this way, time ebbs and flows, swells and contracts.  The concept of Einstein as an American Indian is an intriguing one!)

When you walked into the room, the clock was between ticks.  Since your view of the pendulum was blocked by the sweating, fat woman, there was no visual cue of where you were within the tick-tock continuum.  You had no sense of when the next “tick” would happen.  You were stranded WITHIN time, with no sense of when the beginning or the end would occur.  With no meter, with no metronome, TIME STOOD STILL. 

When the clock ticked again, it told you where the beginning was.  When it ticked again, it told you where the end was.  And from then on, the metronome in your head was reset, time was again a reliable packet, and the clock in the corner continued to move once more.  (Of course, it was running all along.)

You don’t need a grandfather clock to witness this phenomenon, a battery-powered wall clock works just as well.  My wristwatch spooks me every now and then. 

The point is (I think) that once “time” is removed from the physical construct of our biology, our thinking, our understanding - it can become anything it wants.  In actuality, “time” doesn’t exist, at least not in seconds, minutes or ticks.  It’s only something that we humans, some of us, made up – it’s an artificial brick in the wall of reality.

Lucky for me that the road to the tick-tock continuum skirts the wall of reality and runs straight through my hammock… er, well, Einstein’s hammock.  The one with the blueberry muffin crumbs and, on the ground below, a can of lemon Pledge.