Time

The following excerpt is taken from the book "Life Lessons", written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler. I apologize if I do not follow the letter of the law for footnoting this, but what I am taking from the book to share with you is on pages 117-118.

It caught my attention as I was reading it because I have had the same type of thoughts on the subject as well. Here it is:

    "Our lives are governed by time. We live by it and in it. And of course, we die in it. We believe time is ours to save and to lose. We can't buy time, but we talk about spending it. And timing, we believe, is everything.
    "Today we know what time it is at every point on the globe, but before the mid-nineteenth century, we measured time more casually. The advent of rail travel made stricter scheduling a necessity, so in 1883 the American and Canadian railroads adopted the system we still use of four time zones in North America. The plan was considered radical: many felt that the time zones and standards of time were insults to God. Today, we accept our watches and alarm clocks as the
truth. We even have a "National Clock" in the Naval Observatory, and official time keeper for the United States. But this "national clock" is actually a computer that averages the findings of fifty different clocks. 

   "Time is a useful measurement, but it has only as much value as we give it. Websters's defines time as "and interval separating two points on a continuum." Birth appears to be the beginning, and death the ending, but they are not, they are just points on a continuum. 

   "Albert Einstein pointed out that time is not constant, that it is relative to the observer. And we now know that time passes at differnt rates depending on whether you are standing still or moving. Time runs differently if you take a trip on a spaceship or even a plane or subway. In 1975 the Navy tested Einstein's theory, using two identical clocks; they placed one on the ground and another in the plane. For fifteen hours the plane flew while lasers were sent between the two clocks comparing time. Just as Einstein had stated, the time was slower in the moving plane."


The book continues by saying on pages 125-6:


   "We think of the past as coming before and the future as lying ahead, but that assumes time lies on a straight-line continuum. Scientists have speculated that time is not linear, that we are not locked into a rigid past-present-future pattern. In nonlinear time, the past, present, and future may all exist at the same time.
   "Does this possibility matter? Will our lives be changed if time is not linear, if we are simultaneously in the past, present, and future?"


Personally, I cannot help but think that this is a major "reality altering" concept. Everything about our lives revolves around time, and if we were to truly find out how the nature of time works, or even a step further and find out that it doesn't even exist beyond the illusion we believe in, then each life on this planet would be affected in some way. How exactly is way beyond my ability to speculate.