Say, What Time Is It Amigo?

Watched a documentary on Time last night. Must admit I have given the topic some thought over the years, especially now that I'm getting to be an Old Fart. They talked about the Maya and their obsession with counting time, and all kinds of scientific theories, some I could barely grasp, like Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

There is one thing I figured out all by myself. Have you ever noticed that it is always now no matter what time it is? Check it out. Yesterday it was now. Today it is now and tomorrow it will be now.

Of course, the Big Bang theory was discussed and how many scientists and astronomers argue that time began with the mammoth explosion of matter 8.7 billion years ago, and that by measuring the speed at which celestial bodies are moving away from a center we can measure time. Problem is that something had to cause the exposion and it must have taken time to set up all the right conditions for the blast, right?

I remember giving to my sons tidbits of my vast scientific knowledge about time and space, when we went camping, as we lay on our backs high on a rock face in the Sierras, gazing into the cosmos. "Those stars are so far away that there is no human number big enough to measure the distance they are from Earth, so their distance is measured in Light Years, the time it takes for light to travel in one year at 186,000 miles a second! Now, how many seconds are there in one year?" I rhetorically asked. I would pause, while I waited for a gasp from them. "The closest star is about 3 Light Years away, and some stars are a million Light Years away from us, so far that they could have burned out 10,000 years ago, and we are still seeing their light!"

One interesting theory compared time to traveling in a car. The present, the past, and the future all pre-exist as we drive along. The tree you just passed is now in the past, but continues to exist, the house you are now passing is in the present, and the rock up ahead on the road is in the future, but all will continue to exist at the same time! Somehow, this reminded of the old "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?" question.

Time has also been dissected into its smallest components, zilimeters of a second, with the advent of high-speed cameras that can disassemble every drop of a water exploding from a balloon popped with a pin.

All I know for sure is that when there are 3.5 seconds left in a basketball game, and the score is 99-98, it can be a hell of a long time before the game ends!

I think the time has come to end all this fuss about time. Jesus said it best when he was asked "Who are you? Are you Abraham?" and he declared: "Before Abraham was, I am!"