WHEN THE TIME STOPS?
To measure time, something has to tick, for example: pendulum, quartz crystal vibrations, watch movement, atomic vibrations etc. For something to tick, energy is required. If we reduce the energy to nothing, that is if we reduce the temperature to absolute zero, we remove all the heat energy, everything will freeze and the time come to a stand still. It is said before the 'big bang' that is, before the birth of universe, time did not exist.
SPEED OF THOUGHT
Human neurons fire up to 500 times per second, releasing a new impulse every 2 milliseconds. That is we may get an 'idea' every 2 milliseconds. But a supercomputer does 200 peta flops -200 quadrillion operations per second. To match that, a human brain has to make one calculation per second for the next 6.3 billion years.
OUR EYE'S PERCEPTION
We can process and interpret images we see in a time intervel as little as 13 milliseconds. If the happenings are faster than this, our eyes cannot percieve. We will only see 'blur' as in the case of rotating fans and speeding cars.
OUR REACTION TIME
In 100m dash, the runners do not start on hearing the gun shot. But little later, exactly 150 milliseconds later. Human reaction time averges between 150 and 300 milliseconds.
SNAIL'S TIME
Not only snail's movement is slow, but also its brain process. A snail's brain processes only four images per second. That makes time seem to pass slower for snails. Hence they can see a flower growing and grass growing like an action movie.
WHAT IS PRESENT?
Researchers have found that for most people concentration lapses after only 8 seconds. Hence '8 seconds' is the duration of 'present'. But some meditating monks have learned to expand the present to 5 minutes. Our concentration has been damaged since the advent of mobiles.
SMALLEST INTERVAL OF TIME:
10^-43 seconds. This is called planck's time. It is the smallest division of time, we can measure. Further division of time has no meaning in physics.
HOW LONG WE WILL BE HERE?
The mammals have an average species life of about a million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for about 150000 years and should be expected to persist for much longer than that : Humans can survive for many more millennia, If we do not end up destroying ourselves.
TIME IS PAINFUL:
When we travel to another continent, our body clock is disturbed (circadean rhythm). We notice that 'time' in other cultures have different meaning compared to ours.
TIME DILATION
Martial artists, soccer players focus on what they are doing that a 'second' seems much longer to them than it does to an untrained person. So time elongates for them. We also experience a sort of 'time dilation' in an emergency.
Time seems to slow down, but we are not prepared to react more quickly. Athlets train so they can better deal with an altered perception of time.
ARROW OF TIME
We know, time arrow moves only forward. But scientists now think that there may be places in the universe where the time flows backward. One cannot gulp this concept.
So time is not simply past, present and future, but more than that.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments
Post a Comment