Time

So, even though how humans feel the flow of time

is essentially personal and individual,

all humans somehow experience time in the same way,

flowing in one direction,

the arrow of time,

with the only way of measuring it being the use of things that have a cycle,

repeatedly returning to an initial state.

Like the swing of a pendulum,

clocks come and go around,

so define the clock and you define the time

no clock, no time.

Then Einstein brought up that little issue

of the clocks on the platform and the light speed train,

rendering all of the rest of the clocks relative,

and then the ripples and curves of space time and gravity

could be seen as paths of lesser or faster timeflow.

Einstein explained time as another dimension,

with the entropy that comes with the second law of thermodynamics

explaining the directionality of time's arrow,

but still it proved hard to say whether time

as people usually think of it

is actually real or not,

it being so hard to pin down.

The trouble is that whereas Relativity works perfectly well

looking up at the heavens and down at the earth

in a way that may seem different to the way humans feel it,

when looking a lot closer things would seem to work in a quite different way,

and Quantum Mechanics functions perfectly well without needing time at all.

It seems that a Theory of Everything

may yet involve a timeless cosmology

springing from a Janus Point.

Then again, another trouble with time

is that on the scale of time we use for cosmological musings,

the life of a human,

even all of humanity,

is imperceptible.

All that makes them important is that moment they are in.

They have barely sent probes beyond their planetary system,

what affect can they have on the sky's cornucopia of galaxies?

That panoply is there for us to learn from and to wonder at,

to enjoy the beauty of and to be a part of.

Of course, humans see no more than a blink of time in their earthly lives,

but still they can see creatures whose time must move faster

when using the clock of a lifetime,

like mayflies,

or other lifeforms of even briefer existence,

the time between life and death is what counts.

If we could just see into the mind of a mayfly,

what would it think of a human that observed it,

a being living in a completely different scale of space-time,

and dominated by very different understandings of the basic laws of the way things work?

And of course there are many creatures that have much longer lives than humans,

and lifeforms like trees can live a thousand years or more.

But other forms of creation also move in time,

and mountains and continents have their lifespans,

as do the galaxies and stars.

We look at the Creation and this is how we see it.

Why is it so strange then to imagine

that while we are looking out at the universe around us

that there is One Who Sees looking back,

as well as looking through us from within?

One Who is Time.