Why Time Feels So Weird in 2020 72
Some days seem to pass very slowly while some weeks, and even months, fly by. A set of simple perception tests illustrate some factors that can distort our sense of time.
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Why Time Feels So Weird in 2020
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Novelty (Score:3)
Forming memories is essential to anchoring the passage of time. This is why some older people say that time passes so quickly - but it's not a universal experience. They are not doing or experiencing new things. Habits and routine erase lives in the sense that you don't even see the time go.
Re:Novelty (Score:5, Funny)
Not for me! I had spaghetti for breakfast, pop-tarts for lunch and tonight I'm eating coconut cream cake for dinner! WOOOO!!!
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Breakfast time: 1:15pm
Lunch: 8pm
"tonight": 4am
Re:Novelty (Score:5, Interesting)
Forming memories is essential to anchoring the passage of time. This is why some older people say that time passes so quickly - but it's not a universal experience. They are not doing or experiencing new things. Habits and routine erase lives in the sense that you don't even see the time go.
Older people? This is how I explain this, for a four year old, getting one year older means 25% more time in his life while for a 40 year old it means 2.5% more time in his life. Thus, for the 40 year old 1 year seems almost negligible and seems to go faster than a year when he was 4 year old since relatively speaking, at 40 year old, one year is 10 times less time so it is perceived as such making time seems to go faster if you look at the calendar.
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But that's not why the 4-year old sees time so slowly. More things are novel to a 4-year old.
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You're both wrong. Children are tinier organisms with smaller brains. They live faster, like a mouse more than an elephant.
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Re:Novelty (Score:5, Funny)
You've never met a 2-year old. They stop for every rose.
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Smell the roses. SMELL the roses.
Not EAT the roses.
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A 40 year old is familiar with most of what happens day to day and it's unremarkable. A 4 year old is having new experiences every day, learning new things at an incredible rate.
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I am 50 and I do not think I noticed anything unusual. My perception of time passing is the same as always.
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I'm getting older, and working from home, and today seems like it's lasted three years so far.
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There's a paper describing this very concept. The author uses the term TPF (time perception factor).
https://www.academia.edu/36292... [academia.edu]
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Yes! You have obviously heard of my Theory of Relativity (mine, not Einsteins). Time is relative to the human mind as it has no objective way to measure it. The effect you note in your post is one part of the Theory - the other part is that the human mind cannot conceive of a longer passage of time than twice what it has already experienced. The mind is bound to measuring time relatively, not absolutely.
This explains a great many things
1) To a 4 year old an 8 year old is a big kid, and they often emulate
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I had always figured it was due to increased experiences.
For example the first year of your life is 100% of your life.
Now from year 1 to 2 that second year accounted for only 50% of your life.
If you reach 100 years old that 100th year is only 1% of your total experience.
Being able to fall back to your past experiences will make time seem to go by rather quickly.
I have been working for over 20 years. However that time had seemed to fly by much faster than the 19 years of schooling.
Re:Novelty (Score:4, Informative)
I had always figured it was due to increased experiences.
Technically decreased experiences. At least not new ones.
20 years of working - doing the same thing every day, relatively little time for hobbies or social gatherings. There's not much to remember. If you don't form long-term memories of something new, time is large chunks of sameness. It might feel slow going through it, but retrospectively, you don't see where the time went.
I loved the "When was that" part (Score:1)
They threw in the correct year for all the questions above the dot. Didn't have to change a thing
No (Score:2)
Clocks were invented to help us track the passage of time
It would be more accurate to say that the clock was invented to help us navigate the ocean. Or at least, time keeping devices in general, though the accurate mechanical clock came about for the same reason.
From a purely pessimistic standpoint (philosophical pessimism) the clock has been the most harmful invention in the history of mankind and the absurdly ambiguous little demo in the article make it clear why that is.
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I love the sundials they put on on boats. One only has to know where they are to know what time it is so they can figure out where they are!
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No, the most harfull invention was fire. Because it allowed the cancer that is our species to survive, grow, and metastize all over the planet.
Now watch as all the misanthropist-haters downmod me to hell. That's ok, I've got karma to burn anyway.
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If there is no one to appreciate humans not being there, does it exist at all?
Death through disease, or being torn apart, is standard for animals.
For one brief moment, we have rules to stop ripping each other up, so long-term enterprises like farming and factories, can exist and come to fruition without the rest of humanity looting it, locust-style.
Perhaps everything except humans is the wrongness, the historical evil. And only until recently. And partially at that.
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not worth the mod point, but you should put your money where your mouth is.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
It might only be correct to say that clocks which could keep accurate time even when they were being subjected to varying acceleration might have been invented to help us navigate the ocean, but it is certainly not true of clocks in general, as clocks existed for over a hundred years before a mechanism was actually invented that enabled them to keep accurate time while being bounced around by waves. Until that time, clocks were virtually useless on the ocean.
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This is not the case.
There were many clocks in ancient times, sundials, water clocks, hourglasses, etc. Water-mechanical clocks first appeared in the 10th century. In the middle ages (12-13th century, IIRC), fully mechanical clocks started appearing in Europe.
Mechanical clocks were invented to call people to prayer, the early ones had no face or output other than the church bells. It was in this period that most of the machine tools were invented to manufacture the clocks (the mill, lathe, drill press, etc)
Count the hominids (Score:3)
We'd been living together for a million years
But now it feels so strange out of the atmospheres
And then the jukebox plays a song I used to know
And now I'm staring at the bodies
As they're dancing so slow
They don't write them like that anymore.
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They just don't.
Obligatory Data (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (SFW)
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Ha! I turned off my internal cronometer years ago...
phrasing (Score:1)
It's weird to ask me how something felt to me and then tell me I guessed wrong about the objective time.
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What bugs me is the one with the solid object, shrinking object, and growing object, they appeared to take the same amount of time to me, but they question insisted that I choose one that seemed to take longer. That's a big fail on a test like this, ruins the data they collect.
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Replying to myself, but another awful one is the question, "When was the summer Olympic Games held in London?" but the Olympic Games were held in London bother before and after the given date. They need another word in the question.
What is that? (Score:2)
Is that even a summary? That has to be a record for the shortest Slashdot summary ever posted.
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It was a summary of the summary. You know how people are here...
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Hey it is better than most which just rip off the first few paragraphs of the article. It is actually a summary vs introduction.
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Weirder than 140 characters full stories ?
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You're talking about Twitter, aren't you? Some people may be able to write a proper story with only 140 characters, but I'm not one of them.
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Well, the article is utter crap so it's not like they could really summarize it.
"We show you a bunch of animations which are all the same length and then ask you which feels longer. (Please don't count the seconds they are on the screen!) Then we ask you to guess the dates things happened, even if you never knew them to begin with and probably don't care enough to even guess."
But hey, that's why time feels so weird in 2020. Like warm peanut butter with chunks of sponge in it between your toes. Feels so weir
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But hey, that's why time feels so weird in 2020. Like warm peanut butter with chunks of sponge in it between your toes. Feels so weird.
no mod points but - lols
Time is an illusion anyway (Score:3)
There is not such a thing as time. We're all sitting in this one moment, and things are moving around. We've decided to associate 'things moving around' as 'time passing'.
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Lunch time doubly so. -D. Adams
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Actually all events are happening simultaneously. The illusion is the temporality.
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The illusion is the temporality.
Eh, that's life...
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Some while back, people built entire structure that seem to be designed to identify when a star occupies a certain position in the sky. The effort that went into these things suggests they were multi use...at least once per year a start would occupy the same spot in the sky and the people could know "what time it was". Probably something to do with seasonality.
From th
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From that descended the calendar, which is still cyclical in nature but less so with the addition of years. Then the mechanical clock which is yet less cyclical and, at least in our heads, cements time as linear.
I feel like all clocks should have 2 separated circles. One would signify the Sun, the other the Earth. The hands would be on the Earth circle. One long, reaching the very edge of the circle, the other short, reaching out just halfway. This would be a 24-hour clock. The short hand would be the minute hand, and the long, the hour hand. The short hand would go around every 60 seconds, and represent minutes. The long hand would take 24 hours to go all the way around. The long hand would point directly
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Unfortunately, it isn't so simple. You wrote:
This wouldn't work. The apparent speed of the Sun is not constant (because the orbit of the Earth is elliptical and because the Sun doesn't move along the celestial equator in the sky). Thus your clock's l
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Physics says otherwise (Score:2)
There is not such a thing as time. We're all sitting in this one moment...
Yes there is. Time is just as real as space and, if you learnt some relativity you would know that if one person is moving relative to you then their direction of time lies slightly along one of your direction's of space and vice versa. This is why you get length contraction for objects moving at a large fraction of the speed of light: their length points along your direction of time so the object looks shorter and the front and back of the object exist in your frame at what for the object itself are diffe
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I get what the laws of physics say, and they're not incorrect in their ways of explanation (regardless if the explanation is functional or well-understood or not) . However, what I'm saying is still true. What I'm saying, and what you're saying, is linked by what Einstein came to term "relativity", which as I understand it, has to do with space/time. The problem with our fundamental understanding of "space/time" has to do with something that Einstein is also "responsible" for, which was the removal of "e
Learn some Physics (Score:2)
Without this "ether", no one can really understand even what space is.
What are you going on about? Yes we can understand what space is and we do not need any sort of aether to do it.
Because in reality, what we all term "space/time" is actually "space/time/mass/gravity"
No it is not. Mass and gravity are not the same as space/time. Mass is just the energy an object has when at rest and gravity is a force which couples to the 4-momentum of a particle.
The key to understanding, what we call black holes, has to do with understanding the ether.
There is no aether. Light does not need a medium to propagate through vacuum it is a fundamental quantum field. QED, the theory which explains it, is the second most precisely tested scientific theory we have with r
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Shit, I'm an idiot. I can't even spell "aether". And you're right about Einstein not doing that experiment. I learned somethings today. I'd always heard he did. Thanks for correcting me! Hell it turns out that he supported it (that there is no aether) for a while (calling it aetheory) and then later decided that aether does exist.
Check out a guy named Walter Russell [wikipedia.org]. He was the guy that predicted the discovery of plutonium based on his harmonically aligned 'table of elements'.
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There is not such a thing as time. We're all sitting in this one moment, and things are moving around. We've decided to associate 'things moving around' as 'time passing'.
It is actually a lot more complicated than that. Causality gives time a direction.
Yes, I am aware Quantum Theory says there is no causality. But Quantum Theory does not scale to macroscopic observations, since it still does not model gravity. Due to this little flaw, it may also be quite wrong overall, despite having been exceptionally well verified.
Relevant quote (Score:4, Interesting)
"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen." -Lenin
Yeah, Lenin was a jerk, but this quote is perceptive.
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"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen." -Lenin
Yeah, Lenin was a jerk, but this quote is perceptive.
Lenin was indeed a jerk (to put it nicely) but he was pretty perceptive in general.. Where I don't agree with his social or political conclusions, he was pretty astute in the observation of how people, political parties and governments worked, and he was pretty adept at manipulating them to his benefit (like all Marxists).
Yeah but (Score:2)
Time just exists so everything doesn't happen all at once.
Also, time doesn't 'flow like a river' or 'fly like an arrow' or any of those other old metaphors.
Time is more like a foam that we're passing through than something that is passing by us. But that's just because of our vantage point, we can't tell.
Like dropping a ball on a moving train, it looks like it's falling straight down to the person on the train, but in reality it's traveling horizontally as well.
It's all in your perspective, and we're stuck
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Also, time doesn't 'flow like a river' or 'fly like an arrow' or any of those other old metaphors.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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Also, time doesn't 'flow like a river' or 'fly like an arrow' or any of those other old metaphors.
Perhaps... but it does keep on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future.
Because the drugs of 2019 (Score:2)
... are wearing off.
Time flies ... (Score:2)
Fruit flies like a banana.
Whoosh? (Score:2)
Re:Time's fun ... (Score:2)
-- Kermit The Frog
Who said "time feels so weird" anyway? What? (Score:1)
Interesting (Score:1)