All Relative Really

Time. We often think about it. It affects everyone. We are born, we live, we die (that last part for most people is still in consideration). Time. We are all familiar with songs about it.  There’s over three hundred and twenty published songs alone, with the word ‘time’ in their title. ‘Time is on our side’, so sang the Rolling Stones (boy were they wrong), ‘(If I could save) Time in a bottle’, sang Jim Croce, ‘For the Longest Time’, sang Billy Joel (some years later), and best of all (one I love) the ‘Theme song’ from Casablanca (written by Herman Humfield) ‘As Time Goes By’. I know it wasn’t really the theme song, but the film is certainly what everyone thinks of, when they hear it. Me, all I could think was, how long was that afternoon’s class truly going to last (and that was nothing to sing about).

I myself had often wondered about time. I had, during my childhood, been in many situations where I had wished to control time and speed it up, to get something over with. Or, at least, to have turned time back, to have undone what I may have caused to have happened. The incident with my brother (see blog 1^st April 2012, and onwards), for example, the moment the stilt came falling down, I know I wished I could have reversed time and reconsidered my choice of projectile (to get the kite from the tree, not to have hit my brother with). Actually, that projectile throwing was about physics as well, wasn’t it. Time is always about physics. And space. Time is also about space. The speed of the earth, travelling through space, would prevent time travel wouldn’t it? Lets look at it from a point of view, relative to the earth, let’s say. Because to consider time, you have to consider space, and to consider space, it has to be relative to something. So let’s say the earth, without going all cosmic.

But if time is going backwards, then I suppose, the earth would as well. And if the earth went backwards then you would be going backwards, and to achieve any sort of change to the situation, you would need to actually stop or freeze time for a moment (everything, except you of course), to be able to reconsider what you needed to change, to prevent what happened, from happening. You wouldn’t really be able to change things at all, unless you could put yourself outside of time (and therefore outside of space). As you would be going backwards as well as freezing time. The second you went backwards in time (if you could go outside of time), then, logically, you would be in a different location (in space).  That is a given. As the surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second--or roughly 1,000 miles per hour relative to the centre point of the earth. And not to mention how far removed you would be cosmically?

(Continued tomorrow)