She looked at me and smiled .. a smile of familiarity, a smile of comfort ..
She was a friend from my college days .. “Coffee?” I said .. She looked at her watch and said “not today. I have no time. I will call later”
I was amused by the response “no time” ..
What is time? A question that bothers many .. I'm not the first one to think about this. Earliest reference to this question is from St Augustine (AD 354 - 430)
Calendar time is the easiest to relate to. Look up the clock on the iPhone and the seconds show ticking by ..
Then we have the experience time .. There is a hard deadline of a project two weeks from today and you never realize when that time just walked past you .. on the other hand, stand in front of an audience to talk for 10 minutes and you know what happens .. fixate on the clock on the iPhone and suddenly time seems to stop .. suspended in eternity .. take your eyes off and watch a movie .. time seems to hurry up ..
And there is biological time that each of us carry intrinsically. I wake up at 5am everyday .. alarm or no alarm … my body knows it .. my dog knows when I’m supposed to take her walking and she gets up ready ..
And our concept of time based on sunrise or sunset works in some parts of the world while it means nothing in other parts ..
Adding to this confusion, Einstein introduced relative time .. now my clock and your’s are different .. whether we stand next to each other or far apart or up in the mountain .. ha! The burden of time ..
After all this exercise, nobody even knows what time is? We know how to experience the time or count it but we have no idea what it is?
Peering behind the curtains, you realize the concept of clock time is all made up .. one cycle of earth around sun is called year while the revolving of earth around itself is called day .. even within solar system, each planet takes its own time to go around the Sun .. so, we call those time in "earth years" notation ..
Does time only flow one way? Does time ever had a beginning or does it have an end?
Mathematically you can travel back in time .. Working with equations you see what happens in the past .. math does not seem to care about the one way principle of time ..
Light is another tool to go back in time .. all light we see today can take us back few minutes to beginning of the universe .. yet we can’t physically go back in time ..
.. now, I realized why she had no time .. no time for coffee ..
