Sands of Time

Time is intriguing, lets face it. Its one of most scarce resources, physics claim that there is no evidence of time at all at micro scales, and we all hear the tick tock tick tock of the clock, all the while knowing that there's another split second gone in the countdown to A lvls, to graduation and bye bye world.

Time, like its other cousin, space, suffers from the continuum paradox. It takes a infinitely many points to make up a line, infinitely many lines to make up a plane, and infinitely many planes to make up a space. Likewise, it takes many many instantaneuous snapshots to make up time. ...zip..and thats it, another moment gone. ...zip...zip...zip.. We have a curious one directionality orientation in time, with every instant twisting forever out of our reach into the void that we call 'history'. Curiously, there is no such directionality built into the laws of physics at all. The laws of physics describe the same thing when travelling forward in time, and for travelling backward in time. ..The arrow of time..as popular science writers put it.

Yet I'll like to believe that time is not made up of countless infinitesimal points. There is surreal-ness in time as countless snapshots. Its also a poor sort of time there if it only works in one direction. I'll like to believe that each point in time is not really a point, but a point that have some sort of fuzziness; it spreads out. After all, our concept of 'now' is not an instant, but a memory of the immediate past, and an anticipation of the immediate future. Time ultimately I believe, boils down into relative changes between objects. If there is no change in the universe, then time stands still for us. Curiously, change occurs in one direction, always towards the most stable state, where energy is distributed as chaotically as possible, where the energy for a particular state is as low as possible. It is this phenomena, that we call "entropy", that I believe, contributes to the essence of time.

It has become extremely popular in movies, especially those kung fu shows, to feature The Matrix-like animations, the slowing down of frames for the lead actor into a standstill, the instant in time being dragged out immeasurably. And then, suddenly, the frames speed up back to normal. Sigh, I wish I had to power to drag out time frames too. But then, I will need a giant black hole, and the power to control the black hole as I like...ah..I'm rambling off again. The point is that such movies show that an instant in time is not an infinitesimal point. There's a 'spreading' out, in which the lead actor, possessing information of the past and armed with the anticipation, prepares his next move.

But we are taking out the fun of living in time; too many people leave out the anticipation. Most people arent even conscious of the tick tock tick tock of time. For those people, time has ceased to be discrete; it has become yet another dull continuum for them.