I picked Nature Fast and Nature Slow, How Life Works from Fractions of a Second to Billions of Years by Nicholas P. Money out of pocket curiosity. How do you write a book about the speed of Nature with range from fraction of a millisecond to billions of years?
By no means one can be comprehensive with time.
This makes me think of a human lifespan. Assume we can live for about 100 years. That is if we are very lucky. Thus, going with the theme of the book, how many seconds do we live for?
One way to remember an approximate number of seconds a 100 year old would live, is to multiply the value of pi by a billion, or 3.14 x 10^9 seconds = 99.6 years. Somehow it doesn’t seem long enough.
I am guilty of thinking that a second is not a significant amount of time. However, time doesn’t stop. Life on Earth is general doesn’t care about space-time theories. Most of us don’t travel to space hoping to slow down time.
But what is time? One dictionary definition states that time is “a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future.” A circular definition, because how do you define beginning, middle, and end of time? Who’s to say that my perception of time being linear is true?
Regardless of what’s real and what’s imaginary, time continues to pass, so try to do what you love. Every second counts.
Marta Grońska-Pęski 