How Do You Define Time?

I read on other writer blogs about the need to manage time or advice on how to steal time to write (maybe with cleverly done photoshopped pictures that include the names of great people who somehow managed to write with all of the things going on in their lives). Then usually there is some snippy quote that says, "They have the same amount of time per day as you...what is your excuse?" And I start thinking... this is so not true.

How do you define time? Einstein was the first to propose that space and time were interconnected and that time is simply how objects interact with each other with respect to their position within relative space. And this is absolutely true. There are atomic clocks in Boulder, Colorado right now that are the most accurate in the world. They work by measuring the precise oscillation of certain atoms within a vacuum and only lose a second of time every 3.5 billion years or so. When one of these clocks was raised off the ground by several feet, it fell out of sync with the other clock. The reason is that gravity effects time. By moving one clock off the ground, it was further from the center of the Earth, and therefore time passed a little faster for it than for its neighbor that sat next to it in the same room. At the center of the Milky Way and in billions of other galaxies are these super massive black holes that eat millions of solar masses per second where gravity is so incredibly powerful, that time in the singularity is warped infinitely. Mathematics cannot explain it. Physics essentially fails.

Then there is the matter of time dilation (I break out some math here but it isn't complicated. It is only a square root and I'm sure that you writers out there can handle a square root). I had to make this into a photo on my scanner because the equation editor of Microsoft Word doesn't paste into blogger:

 

Time dilation is also very real. M.I.T. discovered this in the decay of muons when they measured how many decayed at the top of a mountain and how many decayed in their laboratory on campus (essentially at sea level). The closer you get to the speed of light, the closer T prime will get to 0 so that at exactly the speed of light, no time would ever pass for you while it continued to pass for everyone else not moving at your velocity.

What happens when you snap your fingers? You hear a sound, you see it happen, and it appears instantaneous. There is a slight delay in the processing of this information to your brain so essentially, everything that we say or do has a slight lag to it. We never experience the actual "now" that we think we are experiencing. Everything that we do takes place slightly in the past. Neurosurgeons are starting to talk about the possibility that lesions or scarring of the brain can "unhinge" a person from time so that there is no clear perception of past or present and that things can become all mixed up.

In my own life, I think schizophrenia has robbed my mother of the ability to process "time". She becomes so confused...sometimes she thinks that I still live in Idaho, at other times she has no idea what day it is or how long it has been since I visited. But then she starts speaking French, remembers flashes of her childhood, thinks that people who are dead are alive again and that she's speaking to them. Some people call this crazy...but I'm not so sure anymore. I think that lesions on her brain have caused her to become unhinged in time. It makes me question if time even exists or if we create it with our minds as our bodies track motion through space and interpret actions such as sight or sound which are then uploaded by our brains to our consciousness. If you think of a car accident or other traumatic event, time seems to slow down, and details of the crash become burned into your memory. Doctors are now saying that this is due to your mind laying down dense layers of information which in effect...slows down the perception of time for you. People that smoke pot or use drugs can make statements like, "how long have I been standing here?" because the drug prevents their brain from creating anchor points by which you can measure the passage of time.

In writing, it makes sense to me, especially in fantasy, that creatures might perceive time differently. Dragons with enormous lifespans could sleep for thousands of years because to them, a day would be a small percentage of their immortality. Humans...who only have a lifespan of 80 years or so...experience time and its passing much differently. A day is far more precious because it is a larger percentage of your total life span. However, the longer you live, the faster a day is going to seem to pass because your lifespan reduces a day within the totality of your existence.

How do you define time? The more I think about it...the more I cannot wrap my head around the concept of this thing that dominates our lives. "All you do in this life, echoes in eternity" --Honor by August in the song, "Found".