time scales

Interesting thesis.

Here's something to consider: it requires the largest machines built by man, machines many miles in size, machines in the top 1% of most expensive machines, to build and to operate, to make measurements of the smallest entities we know about and the infinitesimal fragments of seconds they exist.

An interesting corollary to the thesis might be, in biology, is there a general correlation between size and individual lifespan? Large trees live for centuries; a bacteria might exist for just a few hours.

 

My thought would be that since every human's sense of time is different, I don't expect animals to be any different. My main observation of animals is man's best friend (I'm a dog owner). I've noticed dogs have all sorts of different personalities...but many will stay "young at heart" even when they have cataracts, are arthritic, and are deaf. I've known more humans who are old and decide not to try things because it's not healthy at their age.

My family is currently dealing with my grandmother who is advancing in dementia. When she first started forgetting basic short term memory stuff, it wasn't that much of a problem. She's an intelligent person and has always been cerebral: so it's more disconcerting that now her judgment skills have been diminishing. Having first only seeing her in her prime, Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" seems to be very apropos today (especially since more people are living longer and it's the mind that can go first).

I'm also not sure about physical or celestial objects being a criteria for a time presence: much of our sense of time is just based on our perceptions. The theory of relativity deals with our own perceptions of interstellar flight: as long as an object is not deteriorating from the environment...it's only humans that would see an effect of the time displacement of traveling the speed of light (IE them not aging while generations of people on Earth do).

 

I read somewhere that the oldest living things on Earth are certain clumps of grass. And bacteria which reproduce by division, producing two essentially identical individuals, can be said to be as old as their first ancestors four billion years ago.

Some tortoises live longer than elephants.

But it is common for small animals to have shorter lifespans than large ones.

We constantly anthropomorphize, attributing to animals concepts, perceptions, and intentions which are integral to our own experience of the world. But we really have no idea how animals experience the world. We know they have personalities, feelings, and intelligence. We can determine whether they perceive colors, how sensitive their sense of smell is, what frequencies they can hear, etc. We can measure their learning speed, etc. But we have no idea how the world seems to them.

 

Actually, at the very small scale, the concept of "time" become impossible to work with. Take the electron for example. The math of our "macro-dimensions" is the usual three space dimensions and one time dimension. The only math that works for an electron (and other similar particles) is for two space dimensions and two time dimensions. It was this math result that convienced Dirac that every particle has an anti-particle.

 

Our present concepts of time are largely influenced by modern technology. In Feudal times, time was measured in days. Peasants owed the lord a certain number of days of work a year. People thought in terms of sunup, sundown, and maybe lunchtime. The first clocks had no minute hand. The industrial revolution made it necessary to measure time in shorter increments as laborers worked on a pay-for-time basis, and then nautical navigation made accurate timekeeping imperative. (There were numerous attempts to figure ways of measuring longitude, but none worked except for the chronometer, right up until the launch of GPS satellites.)

We take for granted our notions of time, but they are very recent.

 

Time is absolutely relative and is experienced differently between species and even individuals.

 

A relative term for a relative dimension.

The mayans didn't deal with femptoseconds, one could argue that is a "recent" time base.

Did you happen to catch that Discovery/Science channel show on Time maybe a year ago? It was very high level, something I am sure my mom could understand, but it presented a lot of prevailing theories on time from a 1000ft view as well as the scaling of the perception time versus age. I found it fascinating none the less. Some british guy, probably in late twenties to thirties presenting.