A Question Of Time

"My fate is the same fate of the physical world. That we coud have come from nothing and return to nothing, this is entirely possible. But lets us enjoy our illusions of immortality." -Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

We all have a fate. Whether it's simple or complexe, we will eventually cease to exist in the "earthbound" way we exist right now. We can speculate about what may come thereafter and we can hope that our spiritual beliefs hold true once all the lights burn out, but while we hope and speculate, we should always strive to learn and seek different perpectives, even though time seems to set certain limits. Even our lives rush by us, because in many ways, we're too "busy" to pay attention. There was an experiment done whereby a group of people over the age of 60 were asked to count down 1 minute, and a group of people under 40 were asked to do the same. The people over 60 always over-counted their minute by about 10 seconds, while the younger group always undercut their minute by about 10 seconds. The constraint of time seems to be much less of an issue when we get older. Do we begin to accept our fate or do we simply begin to realize what matters most? It's probably a combination of both, although I tend to believe that our minds eye gets a clearer, more intrinsic view of who we are and what it means to exist as we age.

But what is time? This question has been on the minds of humans for over a thousand years. Did time commence with creation, or has time always existed? Logic tells us that if time had a beginning, it should have an end. In Christianity, time is said to have orignated at the moment of creation (Genesis), although for Buddhists, their belief is that the universe is timeless, without either beginning or end. The Quantum Theory has not been able to answer this question to date, but it does have a theory on time, represented by the following scenario, seperated into five ages or eras:

First, the Primordial Age. This age is the age of the Big Bang and the beginning of what we know as time. This stage lasted about 350,000 years. We now take a huge jump to right now, about 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, to the second stage which is called the Stelliferous Era. This is the epoch which has brought us not only the stars and planets, but also every bit of matter that surrounds us today. We now move to about 100 million, million years from now in which the universe experiences its third stage, the Degenerate Age. This is the age when the last stars burn out and die. An age where the planets fall from their orbits and in the darkness of space, matter begins to decay. The only things left are black holes. On we go to an age which will far surpass all the time that has passed since the Big Bang till present day. In this fourth stage, the last remaining black holes disappear, devouring the last bit of existing matter, giving way to the fifth and last stage, The Photon Age. This is the age where time fragments into total disorder. All that remains of our cosmos will be invisible, low energy light particles.

In this Quantum scenario, we begin to see that time evolves. If we are able to be around in the last stages of the universe, we may not even recognize it as time at all. It has been proven that particles can in fact be in two places at once, so we might uncover that there are many universes, each with a time of their own. Ultimately, this time that we feel passing, that we know and trust, may be somewhat of an illusion; an illusion that allows us to make sense of our place in this tiny corner of the cosmos.