Saturday 1st February

Does time really exist?  In any meaningful way anyway.  If the planets didn’t move, or more precisely if we didn’t go round the sun once every 24 hours so creating night and day would time still exist?  I know that we too wouldn’t exist without this spinning and so creating gravity, but putting that aside for a minute it seems that we, humans have created the concept of time as the measure of our days.  I am not sure that any other species counts the days, rather their cycles are triggered by the seasons or air temperature or the gravitational pull of the moon.  And once we began to measure the days and the bits of the days and the years we started thinking about ourselves in quite a different way.  Maybe no other creatures actually do think about themselves, well not in the introspective way that we do.

So is time just an illusion, and with it all our ideas of the Universe.  I mean what does a light year really mean?  186,000 miles per second is an awfully difficult thing to imagine anyway, and then multiply that by 60, by 60 again, then by 24 and again by 365 and you lose all sense of distance let alone time itself.  So if scientists tell us that the Universe is 13 billion years old what does that really mean.  Not very much I am afraid.  Maybe all Astro-Physics is simply incomprehensible.  All we can really understand is time as it relates to us, minutes, hours days and years.  And even these have no exact meaning.  Some hours fly past, the yers certainly do and yet to wait five minutes seems intolerable at times.

And yet our whole society is run on time.  Which none of us really understands anyway.  And if we didn’t exist would time have any meaning at all?  And that brings us to the biggest question of all – what is the meaning of the Universe?  Or is it all an illusion?  Anyway must dash – time waits for no man.