Monday, April 04, 2005

Why Do Molecules Not Just Fall Apart Into Atoms?

It comes as quite a shock to me that it is April 04 of 2005. i can't seem to grasp a hold of time.

i am very unsure as to how the minutes can feel like hours or how the hours can seem like seconds, and how all the other units of time can confuse themselves in my state. It's more than remembering how summers felt like they lasted forever when i was still in grade school - everyone can recall time differences with this cliché-ridden example - but i can lose a whole day to what seems like a couple of hours. Or a whole month can feel like it passes in a few days. i feel like i have lost a lot of years.

Einstein says that it is all relative. In his Special Theory of Relativity, he predicted that time does not flow at a fixed rate, when generalized to explain gravitational time dilation . I am that observer he speaks of, watching something fall into a black hole; i'm here far away, thinking that time stands still, but the object is already long gone.

1 comment:

  1. As the great Quantum Physicist Buckaroo Bonzai once said, "Wherever you are, you're there". He was careful, however, not to apply the same logic to time. If you're going nowhere fast, but then are able to slow down time, do you start going somewhere slowly? I guess that's neither here nor there...

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