The "Quickening" - Why is time speeding up?

reply to post by discl0sur3


It is just you. You are growing up, and you're slower than you were before. So naturally, everything around you seems to pick up speed.

"Do you feel like time is accelerating? The day is over before you know it? Our Pace Picks Up Speed! Our Age of Technology seems to have squashed time. ".....we squashed sh.it, go and stay on a village and you will be bored by how hard time passed !!..

To answer the original question; "Why is time speeding up"? Its because the transfer of Earth's rotational momentum to the Moon's orbital momentum as tidal friction slows the Earth's rotation.

The old saying; "The days are longer but the years are shorter", is actually true.

In the days the dinosaurs roamed the earth a day was about 22 hours long and the year nearly 400 days. 4.5 billion years earth spun faster than Saturn (which is 10.5 hours) and bulged fatter than Saturn at the equator. The slowing rotation of the Earth results in a longer day as well as a longer month. Once the length of a day equals the length of a month, the tidal friction mechanism will cease. That's been projected to happen once the day and month both equal about 47 (current) days, billions of years in the future. If the Earth and Moon still exist.

Every 18 months on the average, with variation, a leap second is added to planetary time keeping to keep the day consistent with atomic clocks and astronomical observations. Leap Seconds

reply to post by Illustronic


I can't argue with what you are saying, but it is more likely the OP feels this way simply because he is getting older.

When the OP was 5 years old, 1 year was a large chunk of his life. Even when he was 10, a year was 1/10 of his life. If the OP is now 30, the 1 year would be a much smaller chunk of his life, so therefore 1 year would seem relatively shorter than it used to feel.

...Now -- I DO agree with your message under your screen name (above your avatar) that the egg obviously came before the chicken. The animal that laid that egg was some sort of "proto-chicken" but not quite what evolution would call a chicken. However, inside her egg was an animal with slightly more mutations than it's mother -- mutations that would put it squarely into the classification "chicken".

So, yeah, the egg obviously came first

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

I know exactly what the OP was referring to or experiencing, which is why I used the old aging saying. I came to this realization at the end of one summer while my friends and I were preparing to enter 6th grade, that the summers seemed to be so much longer when we were kids. I thought I'd bring the philosophical idea into a more scientific space exploration forum, eh, just for the hell of it.

A fascinating scientific concept that when taken back to early earth, some scientists, geologists, believe an earth day could have been as short as 6.5 hours, and the circumference bulge at the equator could have been some 3,600 miles fatter than it is today, at just about 27 miles fatter than the pole to pole diameter extended to a sphere. So the furthest point from the absolute center of the earth is actually a mountain top in Ecuador, and not the top of Mt. Everest, that point in Ecuador you would weigh less than anywhere in the world. Just to throw another thought into the pot.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
reply to post by Illustronic

 

I can't argue with what you are saying, but it is more likely the OP feels this way simply because he is getting older.

When the OP was 5 years old, 1 year was a large chunk of his life. Even when he was 10, a year was 1/10 of his life. If the OP is now 30, the 1 year would be a much smaller chunk of his life, so therefore 1 year would seem relatively shorter than it used to feel.

...Now -- I DO agree with your message under your screen name (above your avatar) that the egg obviously came before the chicken. The animal that laid that egg was some sort of "proto-chicken" but not quite what evolution would call a chicken. However, inside her egg was an animal with slightly more mutations than it's mother -- mutations that would put it squarely into the classification "chicken".

So, yeah, the egg obviously came first

Please stop with the "each day that passes is a smaller chunk of his life" thing. It is stupid. The way we understand time has nothing to do with how much time it has passed. The arithmetic of time does not affect our brain in any way.

Originally posted by masterp
Please stop with the "each day that passes is a smaller chunk of his life" thing. It is stupid. The way we understand time has nothing to do with how much time it has passed. The arithmetic of time does not affect our brain in any way.

Obviously time isn't passing by 5 times faster for a 50-year old as it is for a 10-year old. That's not what I'm saying. It isn't THAT regimented of an effect. But rather it has all to do with LIFE EXPERIENCES and how our brain processes those experiences, specifically first-time experiences.

When we are younger, we experience a lot of "Firsts" -- and those first-time-experiences tend to be moments we remember. So, when we were younger, we remembered a lot more happening in our lives -- and for more things to happen, our brains need to perceive that PAST perception of time as moving more slowly. As we get older, we have fewer first-time experiences. Therefore, looking back on the year that just past by for a 50 year old, not a lot of new things happened to him, therefore his brain doesn't need to remember all of those first-time experiences, and the year could have been perceived to pass by more slowly.

Maybe you don't feel it , but it certainly affects my feeling as to how fast one year of my life passes by. I remember as a youngster that a year felt like forever -- and it was when compared to the only time frame I could compare it against, which was my span of all my Life Eperiences up to that time. As I approach 50, one year seems top pass by at an incredible rate, and that's because I have experienced almost 50 of those years, with far fewer first-time-experiences -- therefore one year is just one more "drop in the bucket".

The drop in the bucket analogy is a good one -- with the drops being a "One first-time-experience" and the bucket being all of my life experiences to this point. If I put a drop of water in a thimble full of water, it makes a noticeable difference in the amount of water in the thimble. If I put a drop of water in a bucket full of water, it doesn't really make the bucket much more full.

You don't need to believe me, but you may want to read what others say on the subject:

Psychology Today Article

Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?


And here is a related article in Scientific American that discusses a different aspect of our brains' perception of the passage of time. The point is that the brain could perceive time to pass at different rates.:

Why Does Time Fly?

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


I Totally agree with you Soylent. It;s not that time is travelling any faster, and if it were, we're in the same frame of reference, so time could travel faster but we wouldn't experience it any differently. It's simply that the older we get, the shorter a day is relative to our time on earth.

When you are 2 days old, one day is literally half of your lifetimes experience....therefore it feels like a long time.....where as when you are 80...it's a tiny fraction, so it feels like it's far less significant.

Cheers

Robbie

reply to post by stratsys-sws

What I am saying is in general agreement with what you are saying -- but I'm NOT only talking specifically about how one year was a larger percentage of our lives when we were younger -- although that is part of it.

Rather (and as I said above), we have more first-time experiences when we are younger. I admit, that is a function of one year being a larger percentage of our lives, but it goes beyond that. Our brains tend to remember those first time experiences because they are very important to us. Therefore, the br5ain will perceive a year full of first-time experiences for a 10 year old as passing by more slowly a brain of a 50-year old would perceive a year, because the 50-year old probably had very few first-time experiences.

So, yeah, we could simplify it be saying 1 year to a ten year old is a larger percentage of his life than it would be to a 50 year old -- but the reason WHY is because of first-time life experiences, not just simply "percentage of life".