From time to time, time does weigh on my mind. This morning is one such time.
For as long as I remember, even before I became aware of physics as a subject and Albert Einstein as the grandee of that world, I had that nagging sense that time was notional.
One remarkable feature of time is that the universe makes less sense as time goes by. The expression time goes by is not accurate because nothing is really going by.
Speaking of time, today happens to be the so-called last day of a so-called year, in this case 2020. I can guarantee that in the broadest sense there will be zero difference between 11.59 tonight, which is December 31, 2020, and 12.01 a.m., which is January 1, 2021. The change of what we call year will make next to no difference or as much difference as any notional passage of time makes at any point during our lifetime.
All of us have a nebulous sense of the passage of time without quite being able to pinpoint what that is. That could be because there is really nothing called time. Perhaps the nearest anyone comes to feeling time tangibly, if we could call it that, it would be a watchmaker or a watch repairer but they too deal with tiny gears and screws which together do not quite add up to the grand idea of time. I used to say a long time ago that merely because you have a watch, it does not mean you have time.
Just about now you ought to wonder about the disjointed nature of this post. That is exactly how I think of time—fractured and splintered. Every individual lifeform, human or otherwise, lives in an individualized time which is unique to them. My time is not your time. We just have this illusion of time convergence which keeps the world generally sane for us collectively. As humanity we have just agreed on the broad uniformity of time, such as the beginning and end of a particular year or a month or a week or a day. We have done it because that is the only way to smoothly run our lives. However, we must all be conscious that within that uniformity we are all on our individualized time and experience caused by it.
Einstein’s idea that time passes differently in different places in the universe is applicable to individuals as well. It can be unsettling to know that we all live in our own individual time cocoons which converge with others from time to time. We are all just discrete chunks of time floating around.
My favorite teenage story also relates to time. I have written about this. I must have been 16 when this happened. I was waiting for a bus one afternoon near Ahmedabad’s C U Shah Science College where I studied physics and chemistry. I was wearing a newly gifted HMT or Hindustan Machine Tools watch. As I waited for the bus an older man also joined at the bust stand.
For reasons I did not understand then and have not since, he asked me pointing at my watch in English, “What is time?” Why in English? I do not know. Also why point at my watch while asking for the time because where else I was going to look for the time. More importantly though, the way he framed his question which was clearly grammatically incorrect. I knew he mean what the time was at that particular point.
I could have disregarded the inaccuracy and answered without trying to be a pain-in-the-arse smart aleck about it. But did not. Instead, I said, “That is a question even Einstein did not fully answer but if you want to know what the time is, it is 4.10 p.m.,” I answered. The man was both mystified and pissed at my response, especially coming as it did from a teenager.
Just how upset he was could be gauged by the fact that he did not board the bus even though he wanted to. I did.
