Thursday, December 28, 2006

time-space

Yesterday, I saw a friend for the first time in two and a half years, and we got into a discussion about why time seems to go by faster, now that we're older. He seems to subscribe to this theory by some dude: that we have limited space in our brains to store memories, and as we get older, the events we store in our memories over the course of a year are more and more spread out. So whereas you may have stored 150 events per year when you were 10, at 24, you only store 50 events, which is why you look back at your year and think, JEEZ! That went by quick (this may not be a wholly accurate summary of this theory, as I have an attention deficit problem and may not have paid attention closely).

But I think that is a load of horse dung. Here's my theory, which is infinitely cooler and better--time doesn't work the exact same way as space, because when you go from point A to point B in space, you do not take up the space from point A to point B--you leave point A to get to to point B, and when you are at point B, you are no longer at point A. But when you travel in time, you actually take up the entire "space" that you have been travelling--that is, if you travel from point A (your birth) to point B (now), you are actually still occupying point A and every point in between. The only reason you think you have left point A is because most people associate awareness with time, and you are usually only aware of the present, so you think you are at point B and not at point A anymore, because that is where your awareness is. But awareness is different from time--even when you are not aware, you are still travelling through time (like when you're asleep or if you're a vegetable). Thus, even though you are no longer fully aware of what happened when you were 12, you are still taking up the time-space of when you were 12. All of that time is still with you, not just in a metaphorical sense (like oh I still have memories and blah blah), but in a real sense--you are literally accumulating time "space" with every second that passes by (this is why you can only travel in one direction in time--because you are still occupying every point you've been, so if you traveled back in time to point A, you would still be there, and then you would be in two places at once, which is impossible. The only thing you can maybe do to time-travel is to try to bring your awareness back to a certain point, but that is very very hard to do). So the older you get, the more "space" you take up on the time line. That is why when you travel through it, you seem to go faster and faster the older you are--because age is like...time-height. The older you are, the larger the time-steps you can take. And if you don't know that your legs are longer, you won't even notice that you're going faster until you get to the finish line sooner than you expected.

Duh.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

stop thinking