Happy New Year?

I hate to be a party-pooper, but here’s some fun stuff about time I dug out from an earlier post. Pop the cork on the bubbly and toast your way inside.

TIME IS SPACE
Space and time are the same thing. The “space” between the year 1970 and 2000 is 30 years. The “time” between Los Angeles and New York is 2,462 miles. To traverse that distance takes relatively different times. The fastest (at the moment) is by plane and it takes about six hours. But what occupies both points at the same time? Space does. Yeah, I know, a little abstract, but just think about it. Hold your hands out in front of you and pretend like you’re holding a box about a foot wide. Now pretend you’re holding one about four-feet wide. Now go back to the one foot phantom box. You see what is happening? The space between may seem to change, but notice how fast it shrinks and expands with very little resistance. What is the constant between these two distances? The center nothing is. See how fast space expands? Truth is, it doesn’t expand or shrink, it is just there. Light, on the other hand is relative and has to travel through the space to be seen.

Space makes relativity possible due to its infinite constant nature. Space contains an infinite amount of “points.” Points that represent an infinite number of “centers.” Because space is infinite every point represents the center of infinity. You and every single particle that makes you up exists in the center of the universe. Just like everything else you are nothing but an amalgam of relatively diverse points. Time is no more than an incredibly dynamic method of measuring the distance between these points. For example, 6:25PM on October 3, 1873 marks one point and 8:33AM on July 16, 2005 marks another. The “years” in between are increments of measurement.

8:33PM is not a stagnant measurement. It is shorthand. There are seconds and an infinite number of fractions of a second that trail it on its way to 8:34. Time has to be expansive because the planets, the solar system and the galaxy never settle. Everything in space is constantly moving. That means you too. Even if you live a sedentary life you are still cruising through space. It’s almost as if you reside on a path. A swirling, haphazard path made up of an infinite number of points in space. Your age behaves the same way. The space between seven-years-old and forty-years-old is distance not time. Ages are markers just like that 8:33 is. These markers are dynamic because of the way they reject stagnation. Just as 8:33 is shorthand so is forty-years-old. Your age is preceded by months, weeks, days, hours, seconds and then some. The space in between possesses no beginning or end even though it seems to reside between two points. In essence 8 hours 34 minutes and 45 seconds is running away from 8 hours 34 minutes and 43 seconds. Between these two points resides an infinity of points and within the points themselves reside an infinity of points. These points behave just like matter which cannot be broken down to nothing. The points are particles of space. When you reduce these markers (centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc.) to these relatively diverse particles you expose the tenuousness of our time system. Sorry, I’m tying myself in knots trying to explain this. Here, let’s try an experiment.

THE RIDE
Watch the video first and then read the text that follows.

While you sat still watching the video you were going for a wild ride as you floated through space along with every other bit of matter that occupies the universe. In those three minutes and two seconds you traveled a great distance without “seeming” to move at all. Time is like a snapshot measurement of this distance. You could have clicked the play button a fraction of a second after you read the initial instructions or one hour or two days. Consider the moment you decide to play the video as your “jumping in” point. The matter that occupies the universe is constant in its expansion so it does not matter when you decide to jump in. Think of this like singing in the round or even better a massive multiplex that plays an infinite number of movies for an infinity, but no two movies begin at the same exact point. Damn, I hope that makes sense.

For you sci-fi buffs—space occupies both the past, present and future simultaneously. Let me explain, we occupied a particular point in space October 3, 1873 just as we occupy one right now and right now and…more about that in the next segment. The October 1873 point(s) in space still exists and the point we will occupy ten-thousand years from now exists somewhere. I say we, but really every single particle occupies a different point in space. The space you occupy right now cannot be occupied by anything or anyone but you. The crazy bit is that nothing occupies the same space twice.

See how fast space moves without moving. It literally occupies an infinite number of places all at once. You can see how fast it is by watching a fan in action:

There is a considerable amount of space between each of the blades and while the fan is off you can safely place your hand between the blades. Once the fan gets going though, you would likely lose a finger or two attempting that stunt. However, the space between the blades does not change. If you could move as fast as the Neo character in The Matrix films then you could place your hand in between the blades and move it as they moved. The fan blade appears to occupy three-hundred and sixty degrees of space all at once, but this is just an illusion. We are incapable of perceiving the speed of the fan. If the fan were able to move at the speed of space then the blade would become invisible, and the crazy thing is that you would be able to stick your hand into it and not even suffer a nick because in order for the blade to turn at that ridiculous speed it would need to evaporate into the infinite particles it is composed of.

Space is so fast because it unfathomably occupies all of infinity. Don’t try to wrap your head around that because you literally cannot wrap your head around it. Space is within you and without you and it links you to everything else. Go outside tonight and just stare at the moon. What separates you from it? Nothing but space. You and the moon are just two relatively diverse points in space. It’ a beautiful thing, it really is.

RIGHT NOW!
By the time you read this post I have already completed it even though right now I’m still typing it. We live in a state of continual present, but theoretically right now does not exist because right now is the future of right now, but right now can also be the past of right now. Space is the manifestation of this phenomenon. See how space and time are all tangled up in bed together. Time is merely our interpretation of space. We think that over time things break down, but it isn’t time that is the culprit, it’s air or space that wears us and everything else down.

Somewhere along the line we just picked an arbitrary moment to start counting days, weeks, months and years. If you wanted to you could wake up one morning and call that day day one of year one just for the hell of it. Don’t worry about trying to encapsulate the seasons. Our current year can’t even do that. That cantankerous winter refuses to stay inside a box.