What's (the) time?

Some 31 years ago, while waiting at a bus stop in the debilitating 45 degree C. (113 degrees F,) dry heat of Ahmedabad, an elderly man approached me. I was 18 and he must be what I am today. For some strange reason he asked me in English, pointing at his left wrist without a watch, “Please, what’s time?”

Being a student of physics with much more than working knowledge of the English language, I did not know whether to approach that question from the standpoint of physics or English. So I fused the two in my response: “I could not possibly answer what time is. Even Einstein struggled to do so. If you want to know what the time is, I could not tell you because I do not have a watch either.” I know, I know, I come across as an improbably pompous and stuck-up young man but trust me that was me then.

I thought of this incident while reading this fascinating piece in The New York Times headlined ‘Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain’.  It is broadly about how we perceive the passage of time.  The story quotes philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

I have not given the subject a whole lot of thought since my early years as a student. I used to think then that time is an entirely subjective perception. Everyone perceives time differently. Also, time as we define it in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on is actually much shorter than we like to think. A millennium may seem like a long time for an individual but it is really not that long. For that matter even 13 to 15 billion years that the universe is said to have existed for is not very different from a second that just passed.

If you have nothing more pressing to do (and you would not if you are reading this blog) do readhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/health/05mind.html?em

P.S.: I promise this is will be the last post for some time about my experiences at bus stops.