A Barrier of Time

Over the past few centuries, humankind has made great strides in science to help us better understand the universe around us. Our idea of the world went from flat to round about 500 years ago. More recently, the universe went from the size of merely the solar system to what today we believe is 82 billion lightyears across if you take into account cosmic inflation after 13.7 billion years. Even now, we are expanding our minds eye of the universe by stumbling upon theories that could actually bring us to the realization that we are quite literally part of a multiverse. Just one universe floating in the midst of countless others. Yet, we as humans have such a struggle to grasp one of the most prevalent elements of the universe; time. It’s something that surrounds us, guides us, controls us. We know enough about time to function with it but we have no real understanding of the deep inter-workings of time. We can’t harness it and control it, yet we are all moving through it at the speed of light minus the amount of energy diverted to our movement through space. Time is the same for all of us, yet every single form of matter, large and small, perceives it differently. What moves faster through space, moves slower in time and vice versa. If all of our energy that is flowing through time were to theoretically be diverted to movement through space, our movement through time would be halted and we in a sense would become eternal.

So what does the size of an object have to do with ones perception of time? Something with less mass experiences time ‘slower’ than one who owns a greater amount of mass in the same space. Imagine a human swatting a fly for a moment. To the human, this action takes place rather quickly.  So quickly in fact he seems to be unable to fathom how the fly was able to react so quickly and remove itself from harms way. Yet from the fly’s perspective, it took your arm a considerable amount of time to reach him, as if the speed of your arm matched the velocity of a drifting feather.

Between two relatively similar sized creatures (relative to the size of the universe of course), this variation in perceptions of time is quite remarkable. What if we delve into the quantum universe, the movement of plank sized particles is absolutely inconceivable. Though we currently do not possess instruments powerful enough to analyze objects to that scale, we can discern from theory and slightly larger objects the phenomenal movement of these particles. From our perspective, these particles move at a rate completely incompatible with the laws of the universe that function so well on an astronomical scale (The general theory of relativity for example). These laws simply break down and fall apart when applied to quantum mechanics and vice versa.

Ultimately, I believe that once we attain a better understanding of the flow of time relative to an objects mass, we will finally be able make it over this cosmological speed bump and develop a stronger (and most importantly; proven) unified theory. Until then, we will remain stricken by barriers of ineptitude before our race can truly become ‘Masters of the Universe’.