This won't be the last time.

It seems that my favorite topic so far has been to discuss time.  Time is so interesting and everyone has a certain view about time.  Therefore, my take on it is unique and I enjoy sharing my views.  Besides, I've got all the time in the world right now, and I might as well use it for something.  I certainly don't use it properly.  I waste more time than I care to admit.  But that's not what I'm here to discuss today.  I remember hearing about a phenomenon with time when I was in college.  I didn't think much of it at the time, as the only time I cared about at that time was Geologic time.  And those periods of time are so long, that it's hard to imagine the finitely small amounts of time that I'm going to be discussing right now, that it didn't really matter to me.  I'm not intimating that it matter to me now, but at least it interests me now.  The phenomenon that I heard about popped into my head when I started writing about time here.  So, I did a little digging, and found out some more info on it, that way I could competently expound upon the subject.

Whether you believe the story about
how Newton "discovered" gravity...

...he was the first one to describe the affect.
He did so in this book.  It's a fun read, you
should check it out. 

So what am I talking about.  I refer to the often overlooked and little know fact that time isn't constant.  I may have mentioned that before.  But I want to reiterate that fact. More specifically, I'm referring to the effect that gravity has on time.  Gravity, it turns out has a huge affect on time.  Well, huge if there's enough gravity.  To truly understand what I'm talking about, we have to understand gravity first.  We all know about Newton and the apple story, and his "discovery" of gravity.  I have a hard time calling it a discovery, since it's always been there.  I mean, people weren't flying off the Earth before Newton coined the term gravity.  He was just the first person to put a name to something that was always there.  Anyways, gravity is something that is inherent in all object.  Everything in the universe has gravity.  The sun, the moon, Earth, you me, this computer, the speck of dust floating by this computer, even protons, neutrons and electrons, some of the smallest known particles each have gravity.  The gravity that you, I, my computer and the atomic particles have is too small to make any difference.  But you put enough of it together, you get a force that we can feel.  That force pulls you towards the center of the object.  Not the surface, mind you, but the center.  That why when we dig a hole, we don't float back up to the surface of the Earth.  Now, how does gravity affect time?

Yup... he was smart.
I love this guy!

Time affects gravity in one specific and important way, the stronger the gravity, the slower time goes.  So let's think about this.  If you live at sea level, time goes slower for you than it would if you lived on top of Mount Everest.  We've known this since Einstein described the affect in his theory of relativity.  But those were just his theories.  Now we've proven it. Well, not me, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  They used a pair of aluminum ion clocks to measure time so precisely, they were able to see the time dilation difference.   They found that if you moved one clock up a foot, the lower one goes 90 billionths of a second slower.  Just so you can see that, that would be 0.000000009 seconds slower.  So, if you lived at sea level instead of the top of Mt. Everest, which is 29,029 feet (plus about 2 inches every year) high, your life would go .00026 (26 ten thousandths of a second) seconds slower (you'd add that much time to your life).  And yes, that's over a 79 year lifespan, so you're really not gaining much here.  But facts are facts, so if you want to live longer, don't buy that penthouse suite with your millions.  Buy a bunker under the ground and live longer!  Oh, if the original article was too complex, here's where I first saw it. And NASA knows about this, they're pretty on the ball.  So they put this little blip up about time.  It's a fun little watch.

So what else does this apply to?  Well, for starters, if you lived on the moon, where gravity is 1/6th that of Earth's, your time would go faster.  Less gravity, faster time.  If you lived on Jupiter (not a great idea, by the way, the lack of a breathable atmosphere is troubling), you'd technically live a longer life because of the gravity is stronger, thus time goes slower (but again, you'd die instantly from any number of things that Jupiter throws out, including some serious radiation).  If you decided you wanted to go see a black hole (also not the best idea), time would slow to a crawl.  Now we're talking about some serious gravity (they're black because light can't escape their pull, and light is the fastest thing I know of).  And because of it, we're talking about some serious time slowage.  Now, I'm not mathematician and I'm certainly not an astrophysicist, but I know that the time you'd perceive as you approached the event horizon of the black hole would be slow enough that you might never actually realize you're entering the black hole.  In fact, it might go so slow, that time essentially stops and you never actually enter the black hole.  But that's just my musings and exaggerations of the idea, more than likely.

One other thing they were able to prove is what Einstein called the "twin paradox."  I've already talked about this before.  I just didn't know they gave such a cool name.  Basically, this paradox states that if you move faster, time goes slower.  So, if one twin is stationary and the other launches into space, when the astronaut twin comes back to Earth, he's younger than the stationary twin, ignoring the fact that time went faster for him because he was experiencing less gravity. Ok, let's take gravity out of the equation; if one twin is stationary on a completely flat plane and the other runs around for an hour, the one that ran around is younger than the stationary one.    So if you want to live longer, literally, live an active life and don't sit on the couch.

Urban Legends

There are many urban legends out there.  Some of these legends have their reality based in some factual event that has happened in the past.  Some are grotesque metamorphoses of science fact.  Some are just the vivid imagination of someone with too much time on their hands.  Often, these urban legends are told from person to person just like oral history used to be told.  The lines between the legend of the story and the reality of life sometimes becomes blurred.  And with today's technology, email and texting have hastened the flow of these legends, with people often believing the legends as fact because they're finding out from the internet, which is they believe is never wrong. The problem is, the internet is often wrong. Don't believe me?  Fine, I said the internet is often wrong, therefore, since you're reading this on the internet, it must be true, ergo, the internet must often be wrong because you read it on the internet.  No, not buying it?  No problem, just read this article from ABC News. That's a reputable news source that millions of Americans trust and follow every day.  Oh, and in case you're too lazy to follow the link, here's an excerpt paragraph, with a few words italicized for emphasis.  The article is about illegal drug websites on the internet:

               A study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine found that popular Internet search engines

               tend to direct users to sites that appear to promote drug use and provide incorrect and even dangerous

               information.

But, this is about ILLEGAL drug use, so yeah, I wouldn't trust what I read on the internet about something illegal.  So what about places like Wikipedia? As a teacher, I often encourage my students to find sources outside of the mega-online-encyclopedia.  But the reality is that I often use it to get my facts straight.  It is fairly reliable, but even the moderators of Wikipedia realize and understand that their product has inherent flaws that they must regularly check for accuracy. Thus, they created a web page devoted to the topic.  Again, here's an excerpt from that page:

               The Wikipedia model allows anyone to edit, and relies on a large number of well-intentioned editors to

               overcome issues raised by a smaller number of problematic editors. It is inherent in Wikipedia's editing 

               model that misleading information can be added, but over time quality is anticipated to improve in a
               form of group learning as editors reach consensus, so that substandard edits will very rapidly be removed. 

               This assumption is still being tested, and its limitations and reliability are not yet a settled matter.

So, I always tell my students to find another source to corroborate the information they find on the website, preferably from a book.

Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have no problem disproving
the myth that cell phones cause gas station explosions.

What point am I trying to make here?  Something besides the fallibility of internet, of course.  Something that has become an urban legend, mostly because of the internet.  Back in the early 90's as cell phones became popular and readily available to anyone, there was a thought that went around that using your cell phone at a gas station could cause the vapors from the gas to combust causing an explosion.  This idea was spread through the use of emails and later text messages.  The idea was so popular that you often read signs at gas stations asking you to turn off your cellular device so you didn't blow up the gas station!  Well, as we progressed and learned about cell phones, we determined that this just wasn't the case.  Then, on Discovery Channel's show Mythbusters, the two men responsible for the scientifically tested myths disproved the possibility of a cell phone igniting a fire at a gas station.  This episode aired on October 3, 2003.  (Editor's note: I got that date from Wikipedia, which sourced the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters website. It was easier than looking through my DVD collection)

So, you can imagine my surprise last week, while filling up at a 7-11 gas station, I saw this sign, which I have edited to highlight my points of interest:

Point #1 (in GREEN) circles the aforementioned urban legend.  One would think that 10 years after this legend was put to bed, that rational thinking people wouldn't bother with this.  I even checked the Arco gas station that I filled up at today, to see if they had a similar sign.  Nope, no sign intimating that if they made a phone call they'd blow up in a fiery ball of gasoline.  I mean, "NO SMOKING!" I understand.  I get the "Stop Engine" argument.  The fifth point down about not re-entering your vehicle is valid as that could lead to a static electricity discharge at the nozzle, causing the nozzle to catch on fire.  That one's been proven true.  And the last five points, surrounding the "Static Sparks Can Cause a Fire" box are all important to know and follow.  But you DO NOT need to turn off your cell phone. Make a call, text away (it's safer than texting while driving!), take a picture like I did, send an email, or surf the web at your leisure.  You could even watch the video of Adam and Jamie disproving the myth of a cell phone exploding a gas station on your phone while you're filling up.

Point #2 (in BLUE) is just a scary thought.  This thought is that someone said "I have an idea.  Lets put the button that immediately stops the flow of gasoline to the pump as far away from the pump as possible.  That way, when someone does set the nozzle on fire they have to leave the burning nozzle and run inside the store and have someone hit the button, allowing the fire to burn unchecked for at least 10-20 seconds.  Great idea!"  Now I get why they do that.  They don't want anyone to accidentally/intentionally push the button when it's not needed.  But as I said, that's just a scary thought.  But it might just be scarier that urban legends that we know are not true persist in our collective consciousness.  I only hope that we can overcome those lies that invade our lives.  Now you'll have to excuse me.  I need to search the black market for my kidney.  It disappeared last week at a party.  I know because I found a note telling me to look it up on the internet after waking up in a bathtub of ice water...

Life as we know it.

There's a saying... "Life is what happens while you're making other plans."  This is normally only somewhat true.  You make plans, and then follow through with them. Your life follows the plans that you make.  Other people's lives might interact with your plans, but for the most part, the other 8 billion people on this planet don't care what your plans are.  But occasionally, your life doesn't follow through because someone else, someone you've never met, had a plan that either came to fruition, or failed completely, and the effect of that is to totally ruin your plans.

Six degree of Kevin Bacon, one of my favorite games.
But the basic concept displayed here affects us all, all the time.

This affect is most common when there's an accident, say a drunk driver hitting someone's car, thus causing untold carnage.  But occasionally, it's not quite as malicious as drunk driving.  Sometimes, it's a lifetime of bad choices, or at the least, not the healthiest of choices, that cause things to go awry.  And in the end, the those choices don't just affect you.  These choices affect everyone around you, your family, most obviously.  But also your friends, and their friends, too.  It's a six degrees of separation type thing.  For example, "Bob" decides that jumping off the roof is a good idea.  In doing so, he breaks both his legs.  His family is affected because they've come to realize their son is a moron, and now have to take care of the idiot for his stupidity.  His friends are affected because they realize their friend has no concept of reality.  But they're his friend so they stick by him.  Their friends are affected because they have to have the conversations about this stupidity of the action and lose precious time in their lives to this inane act and now have to change their own plans because someone they barely know jumped off a roof and they missed the 5 o'clock matinee movie they wanted to see having a pointless conversation about the stupid action.  Now, this is a silly and completely ridiculous example, that has unfortunately been done too many times (see youtube)  But more serious examples are there to be found.

I'm currently in one of those situations.  A man whom I've never met, made a lifetime of choices.  Be they good or bad, I don't know.  As I've said, I don't know the man.  But his choices affected his children, one of whom I know.  This has caused the person I know a great deal of pain and suffering.  I don't know how to console my friend.  I don't know what to do.  And now I'm sitting here contemplating the situation when I should be doing what I had planned today.  Oh, and on the scale of irrelevant things at this point, the fact that  my plans for the ENTIRE week are now impossible because of this, is a 1 (being not relevant at all when human lives are in the balance). So I have to change my plans, big whoop.  Yet I'm put out because of it and I feel the affects.  It angers me that I have to change my plans.  This was a week I had been looking forward to for two months.  And yet, the fact that I feel anger, angers me even more.  I don't know why I feel anger.  Well, I do know why, and it's a stupid reason compared to the reason why I have to cancel my week.  There will be other opportunities to do what I had planned this week.  Yet because I had to wait for this week to get here, I don't want to wait again.  Or have to make plans again.

Julio Iglesias.  One of my
mom's favorite musical artists

I'm much more of a spontaneous person.  Making plans is not my forte.  And this is exactly why I don't.  Because when you have to change your plans at the last minute, it really puts a hurting on the rest of your life, at least in the short term.  When you make last minute plans, and they don't go through, you've wasted little in the way of time and energy making those plans, so little is lost.  But when it's a long term plan, and you have to cancel the plans, you've spent countless hours in the planning that have thusly been ruined.  I remind myself of the time when I was a kid, and I was playing street hockey.  I ended up taking a stick to the face that caused deep cuts on my forehead and nose.  This seemingly innocuous activity, then caused my dad to have to take me to the ER in order to get stitches.  He had to miss the Julio Iglesias concert he was going to with my mother that night.  I know my mom had been looking forward to that night for a long time, and she probably didn't enjoy it as much as she could have if I hadn't been stupid and hurt myself.  Although my dad probably was grateful for not having to sit through the concert.

Perhaps one day, I'll again do the same thing to someone else. It's more than likely.  My lifetime of choices will undoubtedly cause me to do something and affect my son, who in turn affects those around him, and so on. In this way, it's like a gift that keeps on giving.  Because we're human and we learn from not only our mistakes but other's mistakes as well, we can avoid these things.  But, we're also human, and invariably, we ignore those lessons and do what we want to do anyways.  Thus the cycle perpetuates itself.

Point of view

I generally think Maltin's reviews
 are spot on, but that doesn't mean I'll
 always agree with his review.

Everyone has a point of view.  And, usually, those points of view are different from person to person.  What is pleasing to one person is hideous to another.  What is enjoyable to one person is mundane to another.  So how do we really know what is fun, what is beautiful.  The saying goes that these things are "in the eye of the beholder."  But why isn't there a universal beautiful, why isn't there a universal fun?  It's these differences in perception that make every human unique and individual.  So why then, do we rely so heavily on the opinions and influences of others?  If I, per se, want to go see a movie, but don't know which movie to see, I might go check out Roger Ebert's website, or read one of Leonard Maltin's books on movie reviews before deciding which film to watch.  After doing so, I pick a movie that had a 5 star review, go watch it, and end up disappointed.  I didn't enjoy the movie, for whatever reason.  So why did the critic's perception of this "great" movie vary so greatly from my perception of the movie as a "snooze fest."  Again, it's the intricacies of the human mind and what each and every one of us enjoys or finds pleasurable.  And again, we all spend a lot of time looking to others for confirmation of our opinions. Why do we care what other people think?

I've spent a great deal of my life interested in other people's opinion.  Their opinion of me, my looks, my brain, my girlfriend, my house, my car, my everything.  Why?  Well, for me, it was to gain acceptance from friends and validation that my choices were good ones.  If my friends and family approved of my choice in a girlfriend, then I probably had a good looking one, at least by public perception.  If they disapproved, then probably, she wasn't all that pretty to begin with and I was just not seeing the truth.  But why did I place so much value in those opinions, I've ruined a few perfectly good relationships because I couldn't get over the thought that the girl was "conventionally" beautiful.  She was to me, or I wouldn't have been dating her.  But I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that she might not be pretty to other people and I had to have a girl that others drooled over.  But why?  What's the point.  I've had that perfect girl before, but wasn't ready for the attention that it brought and screwed it up.  I've had the "unconventional" girl, too; the one I thought was beautiful and enjoyed being with immensely.  That one was better for me emotionally, and I had more fun in it.  There's an old song called "If you want to be happy" by Jimmy Soul.  The chorus to the song goes:

          If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
             Never make a pretty woman your wife
             So from my personal point of view
             Get an ugly girl to marry you
And while I thought that was a funny song growing up, there's a small bit of truth to the song.  "Ugly" girls are more likely to stay with you and try to please you because they don't want to lose what they have.  This is versus the "pretty" girls who know they can get any guy they want and don't hesitate to point that out and reduce your pleasure because of it.  Now, that doesn't mean I want an ugly girl, just that I am no longer going to care what society thinks of my choices.  I choose what I find to be beautiful. I don't need a "trophy" wife.  I need happiness and all that a relationship that gives me that comes with.

But what about my family and friends.  I'm still trying to gain their respect.  My parents don't live my life and my friends don't pay my bills.  I do.  So why should I care?  Society wants us to conform to their standards and many of us do.  I find myself always trying to conform to others standards.  Standards of dress and etiquette. Standards of behavior.  Standards of business.  I've slowly, through the years, grown tired of the standards.  I'm ready to break out of the standard cycle and find my own path.  I don't care what people think of me anymore.  That was my first choice.  I didn't care that they couldn't get my name right or that they thought I dressed like a homeless man.  I don't care that I dress up well and can look like a prince when I shave. I hate shaving.  So why do I?  Only for work, because standard business practices say you have to present a certain image to the public of that business.  For others, it might be hair style or color, or tattoo or piercings that are visible.  While I'm not getting a Mike Tyson full facial tattoo anytime soon, I no longer think of his choice of appearance to be stupid, but rightly of his choice to express himself in whatever

way he chooses. Now, the tricky part to this is that I still want to earn the respect of people I know, especially my family, but I'm no longer going to conform to their way of thinking.  I'm going to hope that they understand that decision and respect me for my choices, just as I respect Mr. Tyson's.  The rest of the standards are going to be hard for me to shake.  I still feel the need to conform to business standards, in that I shave for work, at least those that I present myself as the image of that company.  When I'm behind the scenes, I don't shave.  And often get chided for looking like Grizzly Adams with a crappier looking beard.  But I'm starting to feel like people are using me to their own gain, and not really helping me reach my goals.  So, I'm quickly coming to the conclusion of if I want some help, I need to help myself.  And I encourage everyone else out there to do just that.  If you feel like you do more than expected, put yourself in a better position to be recognized for that work.  Don't expect the boss to see you do it, or reward you for it.  Make it known.  The squeaky wheel gets the oil.  No more hanging back in the shadows, no more tip toeing around people's feelings.  It's my life, and I'm tired of conforming to other's standards.

Why do we call it English when we live in America?

When I was growing up, I often wondered about this question.  Obviously, we speak English because of our cultural roots as a British colony.  Since we didn't create our own culture right off as soon as we began settling this continent, we borrowed everything from our British progenitors. This included the language.  Of course, the language was called English because it came from England.  Those first few colonists didn't have any issues with this fact.  They were quite happy being British subjects.  But fast forward 150 years. 1776, the now American colonists decide they don't like living under British rule anymore and start a little thing we now call the American Revolutionary War.  Turned out great for us, but our language was still English, even if we were now Americans.  Why didn't we change our language then?  Probably because we were used to it by that point, and we still wanted to be friends with the English, so we kept speaking English.  Of course, that may just be a bit of revisionist history to fit my argument.  In the end, the short answer is we inherited this language from our ancestors and just don't feel the need to mess with it.

But, just as Darwin discovered with species, languages evolve over time.  This is particularly audible if you were to talk to someone from England, or even Australia for that matter, despite the fact that we have a common language base.  If any American were to go to England today, having a conversation with anyone from across the pond would not be as easy as talking to your next door neighbor.  We all speak the same language, but the words have evolved different meanings for the different cultures.  One word here might mean something different in London, and something entirely different from either of those in Melbourne.  This is even true just in America.  People from the northeast don't talk the same way as people from the south or people from the west coast.  Dialects and accents make the minor variations in the English language spoken in those areas seem even more different than they really are.  I would say that we're getting close to having our own language that is completely different from English, and that given enough time, there could be multiple American languages from the different parts of the country.

That is to say, if we don't dumb our language down before that can happen.  The advent of cellular phones, and more specifically, text messages has begun a downward spiral for our language.  Text messages limit the number of characters you can apply to any certain message, causing them to be a forced length. That in turn caused people to begin to abbreviate their words in order to fit more words into a single message.  This in it of itself would not have been a bad idea if it had stayed in the realm of the text message world. Unfortunately, it didn't.  The youth of today found it so easy that they began to use the abbreviations and acronyms in their every day life, and worse, in their school work.  They seemed to think that it was acceptable to turn in work that looked and read like a text message, missing key words to help understanding and using the abbreviations for the real words.

I find this to be wholly unacceptable.  Maybe it's just me.  The English language is such a diverse and expressive language, when it is learned and used properly.  Authors through the course of time have used it so eloquently. Shakespeare, Emerson, Whitman, Hemingway, Bronte, Morrison, and more contemporary authors like King, Crichton, and Grisham all use the English language to evoke certain emotions from the words they choose.  Some of my favorite books, like Watership Down, by Richard Adams, and the historical fiction writings of Jeff Shaara, while not often considered "classics" all draw me to them through the words they use.  They pull me into the story so that I can almost see what's happening in my head as I read.  The words are powerful.  The words mean something.  I often read these books over and over because of the way they make me feel.  Poetry often creates some of the strongest emotions we can have.  And they're just words put together in different, often creative and unique ways.  To see the English language eviscerated and emaciated like it is in text usage is appalling. I even find calling it a "language" unto itself, which we often do, to be an assault on the term "language."

It is, though, almost becoming it's own language.  If you don't know the meanings, you can't understand it anymore than you could understand Russian or Swahili without knowing those words and their meanings. And it seems like we're trending in the direction of text language being the dominant language, as more of the newer generation of kids prefer that to regular English.  I even worry about where this kind of perversion will take us.  If we're not going to be smart enough to handle using our language properly, and have to dumb it down so that we can text it to our friends, what does that mean for our future?  With all the social media and reality TV, we believe that it's better to be Snooki than to be Einstein.  It's only a matter of evolution before American society ceases to be a world power and we become the laughing stock.  We already see it in our education levels.  We're not first in education when compared to the rest of the world.  We're not even second.  Often we're 15th or worse, and this is especially true with math and science.  And we all know what happens when you forget your history (we repeat it, for those that don't know their history).  And I don't think we're even first in teaching English, and there's only a handful of countries that speak English as their primary language.  We're on a collision course with society imitating art.  It's only a matter of time before we end up like this...

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu is defined as the feeling that you're experiencing something you've previously experienced. I find that I often have déjà vu.  The feeling comes upon me once every other month or so, and I swear by whatever I feel like swearing upon at that moment, that I've done that before, even though I've clearly never done it before.  The feeling is fleeting though, and as quickly as it came, it goes and I'm left with this uncertain feeling that I just missed something.  But try as I might to figure it out, I'm not psychologically prepared to take on déjà vu.  I'll have to settle for a verbal argument.  But that feels like a Monty Python sketch.

I've read a bit about déjà vu.  There are many ideas out there about what it actually is.  The most interesting one that I've read is that déjà vu is a time lag disconnect in our brains between visually seeing something and the brain accessing the information telling us what we're seeing.  What this means is that we see it, and our brain instantly knows what we're seeing, but then lags when trying to get that information to the vital other areas of our brain for us to fully recognize what we're seeing.  So, by the time we are completely aware of what's in front of us, a few microseconds have passed and we've already perceived what's in front of us, so our brain interprets the information twice, thus the feeling of déjà vu.  Or something like that.  I'm not technical enough to really understand which parts of the brain are involved or which signal delays are involved and the speed at which this phenomenon occurs is mind boggling fast anyways, but yet slow enough to fool our eyes and our senses.

Of course, there's the Matrix explanation; the glitch resetting itself.  But then that's not a phenomenon of the brain, but an actual repetition of the same moment over again. But then, that repetition would mean that you're traveling through time, to be able to see the same moment again. But wait, didn't I talk about time travel in my post yesterday?  Déjà vu... I like the Matrix version of déjà vu, but can't believe that reality or perhaps that this isn't reality.  I guess I'm too plugged into the Matrix.  

But what about time travel? Could it be possible to actually travel back in time and experience a moment in time again (or for the first time if it is a time prior to your birth or a place you weren't at when the event happened).  First of all, why would we want to? Living in the past is a dangerous thing to do, and ACTUALLY living in the past could present all sorts of space-time quasality issues.  This is the old "if you went back in time and accidentally killed your dad before you were born..." argument.  I prefer the chicken or the egg paradox argument.  What I'm referring to is this:  If you build a time machine, travel into the past to interact with an event, then you change the event and therefore wouldn't have an event to build the time machine to interact with, so you wouldn't build the time machine and wouldn't change the event.  Ok, let me give it to you this way.  You build a time machine to go back and stop the JFK assassination.  You go back, jump Lee Harvey Oswald just outside of the book depository and stop him from killing JFK (this assumes non-conspiracy theorist version and that Oswald was in fact the only shooter that day), now fast forward to the future, you don't have an assassination to build a time machine in order to stop said assassination.  So you can't go back in time to change the event, thus the event in the past unfolds as it should and Oswald kills JFK.  So can you change the past, no.  The paradox won't let us.  If Oswald doesn't do it, someone else will, because JFK has to die in order for you to build the time machine to go back in time to change the event.  This is clearly displayed in H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine." 

But what about building a machine that allows you to just view the past, and not interact with it.  Sort of what Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences during his time with the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Why wouldn't this be possible, since there isn't a paradox prohibiting you from just looking at it, like a rerun on TV.  Think of all the things we could learn... like did Oswald REALLY act alone?  So many historical arguments we could put to rest with a time machine like that.  But that's just my desire to get history correct, and not politically changed by the victors who wrote the history. 

And what about traveling into the future.  Our present is the future's past, so we'd need to know how to travel to the past before we know how to travel to the future, or would it be the other way around, so we could get back to the present from the past.  What if we got the timing wrong.  Say we go into the past, then come back to the present, but time doesn't stop running in the present while we're in the past and we end up at a time that we shouldn't, but thought should be the right time. In this case, we end up coming back maybe just a few seconds later, or maybe the exact same length of time we were gone for into the future. But is it our future or our present.  And what if because we came back at the wrong time, we run into ourselves in a future that we already came back to.  Then there might be two of me at one time and place, and that'd certainly cause the world to end, unlike the Mayan calendar. Maybe we should just leave well enough alone and live in the present, it's safer that way. 

It's that time of the month

When I created this blog early last month, my intention was to create something witty and fun, with a tad bit of satire thrown in for laughs.  I promised myself that I would find some time every day, or at least every other day, but definitely once a week at a minimum to write something.  Well, almost a month later and I'm finally writing my second blog. At this pace, I'll only have to write 13 total blog posts this year; an even bakers dozen.  At least I won't have to think much at that pace.  But, alas, this is not what I want.  I want people to experience the wonders of my strange mind.  So, I am reaffirming my original goal of writing one blog post as often as time permits, which means you can probably expect my next blog post sometime in early 2014.

So, in continuing with today's theme of time, I often think about time.  What is time?  This is a question that science and society have both been grappling with for as long as we knew time existed.  And when did we first realize that there was this thing called "time?" Did neanderthals wake up in the morning an say "Ug need knew battery for sundial" only to not realize that batteries hadn't been invented yet?  Or sundials for that matter...  So what did neanderthals think about time?  Did the passage of that huge glowing ball of gas in the sky mean anything to them other than 1) it's up in the sky and therefore I should go hunt, eat and claim some female by dragging her back to my cave by her hair or 2) it's not up, therefore I need to hide in my cave with a fire to avoid being eaten tonight?  And when did we first start to use the passage of the sun to mark time?

Science tells us that we've been tracking time, perhaps as far back as 6,000 years ago (well, if you trust wikipedia).  And that's a good starting point.  Early humans realized that the moon went in cycles that they could predict.  That predicted cycle became the first tracking of time, although it was inaccurate. The Mayans made a very accurate calendar, although even they couldn't predict the end of time.  Later, sundials made time more accurate, and much later Pope Gregory III made the Gregorian calendar, which was very self centered if you ask me.  Today, that calendar is used almost everywhere on Earth.  It marks the passage of time from year to year, month to month and day to day.  For smaller intervals of time, we rely on watches.  Here we see seconds pass by, seconds of your life, ticking away, never to return.  But they weren't accurate enough, so we created atomic clocks that use radioactive elemental decay to determine the passage of time.  These clocks are incredibly accurate so we now know exactly what time it is all the time.

But what about before all this.  If we measure time by the rising and setting of our sun (on a basic level of day vs night), what about before our sun existed?  If time is just a human creation to help us understand past, present and future, what about before we existed.  Was there time?  Did dinosaurs measure time?  They had 250 million years to figure it out. Much longer than we've had, although we have bigger brains than they did, so maybe they were just figuring it out at the end.  You know, T-Rex is talking to a Triceratops,

   T-Rex: "Hey, Tritop, what time is it?"
   Triceratops: "I don't know Rexy, what time is it?"
   T-Rex: "It's dinner time!"

But, again, these are human constructions, dinner time, play time, time to make the donuts... So did time exist before humans?  Did the universe care what time it was?  Time for a new star to form, time for an old one to die, time for a black hole to swallow up some cosmic dust, time for two galaxies to collide. And what about before the universe existed. Was there time before the big bang? Was there anything before the big bang? Was there a big bang?  What about after humans are gone from the universe? Will time go on?

Star Trek did bring up one interesting point about time.  In space, time would be somewhat different without a sun to set our clocks by.  Would we be able to "create" a day with 35 hours in it, and get more done?  The saying, "there's only so much time in one day" becomes obsolete when you can create the length of your day.  We're apparently locked into a biological clock that runs akin to the 24 hours of our day, but if we get away from that sun, would our internal clocks adapt as easily as our wrist watches could?  Would other species track time differently based on their perceptions of time? And what if we had lived 2 billion years ago when the Earth had an 18 hour day?  Would we have less time to get things done?  Or would it be the same, as it would still take the same amount of time for the Earth to orbit around the sun.  So we'd have more days in one year, but the amount of time in one year wouldn't change.  I bet Pope Gregory wouldn't be ok with that.

And speaking of moving through space, Einstein and other really smart people began to wonder what would happen to time if you moved at the speed of light.  If we measure time based on the appearance of the sun every morning, then we're perceiving time based on light.  If you can see an object at a moment in time, that specific moment is occurring because the light from the sun reflected off that object and bounced into your eyes.  If you were moving at just short of the speed of light (moving AT the speed of light is a whole other discussion) then the amount of light entering your eye would be different than if you were moving as we normally would, so time would seem to change for you, because the information reaching your brain would be getting there slower, if you're moving away from the object, and faster if you're moving towards the object (or source of light as the case may be).  And for that matter, what about the light we see from the sun.  We don't see the sun as it currently is, but as it was 8 minutes ago.  That's the amount of time it takes for light to leave the sun and get to the Earth.  The same can be said for all celestial objects.  We're not seeing them as they are now, but as they were at some point in the past. So we're all time travelers when we look up into the sky.

But what about time travel, as in H.G. Wells type time travel?  If you're a believer of Einstein, then you can travel through time by traveling close to the speed of light.  Since, again, time and light are related.  You go somewhere at near the speed of light, when you get back to where you started, more time in the normal moving universe has passed than what you've experience, so this in essence is traveling into the future.  That whole traveling to the past thing will have to stay in our memories for now, or until I figure out how to do that.  But that, again, is a topic for another day.