1/6/06
2006! I guess I’m no longer impressed by the fact that we really are living in the future. But still – even at my own relatively unripened age, I can go into a theater and see a film that’s set during my lifetime and yet feels like a costume drama. Time has impressed its weight upon me indelibly, like an allergy that affects your music listening habits.
Someone should make a soap for that – Time Cleanser. Not one of those wrinkle removers or ‘rejuvenation’ crèmes, but something like Tecnu, that you apply in the shower to wash the tachyons off of you. Then you have to scrub all your clothes and sheets so that you won’t be recontaminated.
"Tectac," they'd call it.
Time really is the matter. In your life, in my life. The inescapable engine of change. Bane of philosophers and physicists alike. It makes kittens into cats. You never become immune to its effects, but you may, with practice, become cheerfully ignorant of it.
I’ve been reading “The Elegant Universe,” Brian Greene’s apologia for String Theory. On his way to the central subject, Greene gives a nice distillation of special relativity. (He also covers general relativity and quantum theory in a way that’s less clear, and eventually I just get very sleepy and open to suggestion while reading the same paragraph over and over again, but I digress.) So I can be forgiven now for viewing the world through the eyes of an AP science student, but I’ve begun seeing everything in terms of Einsteinian SpaceTime.
Time and velocity are relative to each observer. And the particularly poetic wrinkle to Einstein’s view of time – the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. Which I guess proves Jim Fixx was right – start jogging and you’ll live longer. Probably not in the way he thought, but what the hell: results are results.
However, to really have any effect on your journey through time, you’ll have to start moving faster than may be comfortable for the amateur runner – roughly 50% - 70% of the speed of light before there’s an appreciable effect. So, I recommend a sturdy pair of Reeboks, plenty of stretching beforehand, and a good ‘walking off’ cool down period afterwards.
A problem arises – doesn’t it always? – in that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more your mass increases. So for those that have taken up jogging primarily to shed those pounds, “E=MC2” is NOT your friend. In fact, Lightspeed Jogging could be the exercise of choice for those athletes who are looking for a legal way to add bulk in the wake of last summer’s Steroid hearings in Congress.
Of course, your gained mass evaporates once more when you slow back down, so all in-season games will henceforth have to be played AT lightspeed. This means several things:
1) Catching a foul ball loses all desirability as it will now be fatal to the unlucky fan. Even those that aren’t killed won’t get to keep the ball. Not out of any MLB regulation, but simply due to the fact that the ball will take the glove with it - hand and all - on its trip to the end of the universe.
2) Night games will now be self-illuminating.
3) A double-header will last no more than 13 seconds, meaning that the ratio of time spent driving to and from Yankee Stadium versus time spent viewing the game will be something on the order of 7000-to-1.
4) Major League Baseball will become the first professional sport to be broadcast solely in Super Slo-Mo. (Golf doesn’t count.)
One thing’s for sure: it will still be the most boring game known to mankind.
Irony abounds. Happy New Year.
- Dave
Note: when running this through spellcheck, Word wanted me to replace ‘unripened’ with ‘Unripe Ned,’ which sounds like the least savory Mel Lazarus rejection from the comic strip syndicate, ever.
----------------------
Link: Don't forget - Time is Money. Does this mean that time is shipped to you by the unskilled laborers of United Fruit?