Is time speeding up?

[Tony2013]

Before I go into it, let me explain that I personally subscribe to the more existential view that time does not exist, and that all is one moment with no past or future that can be summond. However, I only came to this view after I began realizing, not too long ago, that time feels like it's speeding up. I'll give you an example of what I mean: For almost the past year, I haven't felt as if I've had a slow week. Every Friday I say to myself, "Monday feels like it was yesterday."

I'm not studied at all in theories of time, and yes, I know it's down to the individual observer. However, I'm wondering if some of you, who are not very 'normal' in the usual sense, have felt this same vibration... that the wheel of the Universe is spinning awfully fast. I wonder if this has anything to do with UFO abductee experience of time; where it seems they're gone for hours or days, but return at relatively the same time they left.

And yes, I recognize the irony of not believing in time but making a post asking if time is speeding up.

 

[CapnG]

Like all human concepts, time says more about us humans than it does the nature of time itself. I think people only percieve time as moving faster because our lives have become so intense inthe past couple of decades. Email, instant messaging, cell phones, we're all "on call" now, every day of the week. And microwaves and the bevvy of "instant" items we now consume daily perpetuate this concept that there simply aren't enough hours in the day. Eventually we'll probably wind up linked together somewhat similar to the borg at which point everything will not simply be faster but genuinely instantaneous. Perhaps beyond that, time will lose all sense of connection with us and us with it.

 

[Aaron LeClair]

I like the definition of time I read in one of the Conversations With God books. Our way of measuring movements through space. I also like Edgar Mitchell's comment that our physics, which includes the concept of time, is our map of reality. Many scientist forget that the map is not the territory.

All time is Miller time. I don't drink that much beer though.

 

[Poi]

Not sure why, but time sped up for me when I hit my 21st birthday. Before that, it seemed to drag. That's probably a likely thing for all kids and teenagers though. Like CapnG says, we get busy.

Like most older people, it seems to go even more quickly now that I'm in my late fifties. Because of that I have resisted cell phone usage, (yeah, I have one, but its battery is usually dead and I have to look for the darn thing if I think I need it) I don't use email very much, I never use an instant message service, but I do read a lot online. Time seems to crash through barriers in that instant. Goes so quickly.

But time does seem to have sped up outside the normal concerns. Nothing seems as normal as it once did. Maybe that's the reason. Too much info to absorb and we've hit a warp since our world was shattered in 2001. Don't know.

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Time went by slow when I was in school (I hated it) and below the age of 21. Once I got to the age I wanted so I could drink in clubs without getting thrown out, things sped up.

 

[Michael L.]

I can understand that... just the other day I went into a place for just one beer and when I got to my car the clock said it had been like 3 hours. How did that happen?

 

[CapnG]

I've had this theory for several years now that we percieve time as a fraction rather than a constant, thus the older we get, the larger the fraction becomes and the faster time seems to move. When you're a kid, six months is forever. Now six months feels like two weeks to me.

 

[cottonzway]

Time speed up in our own minds the older we get IMO. Myabe it slows down once/if a person gets to retirement but I have many moons to go before that.

 

[The Pair of Cats]

I've had this theory for several years now that we percieve time as a fraction rather than a constant, thus the older we get, the larger the fraction becomes and the faster time seems to move. When you're a kid, six months is forever. Now six months feels like two weeks to me.

So if you make it to 90 y.o, time will seem like a blur?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I've had this theory for several years now that we percieve time as a fraction rather than a constant, thus the older we get, the larger the fraction becomes and the faster time seems to move. When you're a kid, six months is forever. Now six months feels like two weeks to me.

So if you make it to 90 y.o, time will seem like a blur?

So that explains it!

 

[tommyball]

I've had this theory for several years now that we percieve time as a fraction rather than a constant, thus the older we get, the larger the fraction becomes and the faster time seems to move. When you're a kid, six months is forever. Now six months feels like two weeks to me.

I think this fraction theory explains it best.

Michio Kaku did a series on time for the BBC which included an experiment showing how older people's internal clock (for example how long they thought a minute was versus a measured minute) ran slower, leading them to perceive time as moving more quickly as they got older.

There's a clip of the experiment on the episode page.

-t.

 

[valiens]

Why is it that people who claim there is no such thing as time eventually die?

 

[pixelsmith]

i was just talking about this very subject a few days ago. time flys very quickly for me now too.

 

[Poi]

I think my spouse has everyone beat. Every since he was struck by lightning, some fifty years ago, time has been warped. He can't tell the difference between five minutes and an hour. He just gets lost in time. Or time is lost on him, I'm not sure.

So he sets every clock in the house way ahead, like that's going to help.

 

[Astroboy]

I think my spouse has everyone beat. Every since he was struck by lightning, some fifty years ago, time has been warped. He can't tell the difference between five minutes and an hour. He just gets lost in time. Or time is lost on him, I'm not sure.

So he sets every clock in the house way ahead, like that's going to help.

I thinks he got struck by Mary Jane instead of lightning.

 

[Poi]

Guffaw!

 

[mike]

relatively speaking there is merit in the idea.

when you turn 2 years old, you are twice as old as when you were one, so that year 2 represents half of your time spent here, when you turn 3 the the 3rd year is a one third of the total time spent here, and so on, your birthdays come "closer" and closer together,

the year between 49 and 50 is only a 50th of your current span and much "smaller" than the year between 1 and 2 ,a half being "bigger" than a 50th and so on

 

[Rick Deckard]

"An hour sitting with a pretty girl passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour." - Albert Einstein.

It's definitely all about perception. If you're 'clock-watching' then time drags, but if your mind is pre-occupied, you literally lose track of time.

Does the brain have a limited capacity? Imagine what processes the brain has to loop through with every moment of conciousness - does it check your sensory input against a 'database' of past experience before flagging it as 'familiar' or as 'something new'? Are you able to think 'quicker' when you're younger simply because your brain doesn't have to process a life-time's worth of experiences against every waking moment?

 

[mike]

the other thing about time is i believe its affected by gravity feilds.
i was told satellites need to update the onboard clocks to stay in synch with earth based clocks using an alogarythm, the differential being the result of distance from the ground. and there was the famous atomic clocks experiment where one on the ground and one in an aeroplane went out of synch.

ive often wondered if our data in regards to physics is only relative to our particular area of space and the gravitonic influences that are in effect on it

 

[CapnG]

the other thing about time is i believe its affected by gravity feilds.
i was told satellites need to update the onboard clocks to stay in synch with earth based clocks using an alogarythm, the differential being the result of distance from the ground. and there was the famous atomic clocks experiment where one on the ground and one in an aeroplane went out of synch.

If I recall correctly, that experiment had to do with speed, not gravity. They wanted to test time dilation vs the speed of light and found that even by moving at relatively slow speeds (subsonic) that a minute amount of dilation still occured.