Posts Tagged ‘zx spectrum’

100 Interesting Things: #5 Time

March 1, 2010

The Law of Conscious Relativity states that time slows down when you’re at the dentist and speeds up when you’re doing a Sudoku.

Einstein knew time as the fourth dimension, after the three spacial dimensions. Try this: a body, motionless in space, is moving through time at the speed of light. Move the body in space and it will move a little “slower” through time. As the body goes faster through space, time, relative to it, slows down. Of course, this raises more questions than it answers about relativity, but I find it a nice way to visualise the screwyness of how time slows for fast moving “bodies”, i.e. movement just “borrows” a little from the arrow of time.

Anyway, the only reason we are so puzzled by time is because our thinking processes and general experience is intertwined with it. We experience time passing at a certain speed (according to the Law of Conscious Relativity 🙂 ) because our brain itself is a clock. Our experience corresponds to the speed it ticks in much the same way as the number of calculations a computer can do in a second corresponds to how fast its clock ticks. (My old ZX Spectrum went at 50 ticks per second, and could therefore do 50 operations per second).

Our brains are record players spinning at a certain rate through time. The record is the outside world. The stylus is our consciousness, our “present”. We sleep when the tone arm lifts.