THE TIME OF OUR LIVES

EVERY NEW YEAR WE SAY THE SAME OLD THING — WHERE DID THE TIME GO? IF YOU FEEL LIKE TIME IS FLYING BY, HERE’S HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT

January is upon us, and at this time every year, without fail, most of us are wondering how we got here.

American author Gretchen Rubin describes it perfectly in her book The Happiness Project:

The days are long, but the years are short.

The turning of a new decade is more reason to reflect on how quickly time seems to be passing by ... and does it feel like it’s speeding up as you get older?

Quantum physicist Joan Vaccaro, an associate professor at Brisbane’s Griffith University, has spent much of her academic career studying time.

“Time is a very strange thing for humans and in physics as well,” Joan says.

“There’s a philosophical aspect to time, the way philosophers have been speaking about it for millennia, and then there’s this physics way that we have in our theories, and then there’s the psychological thing which we all experience.

“It’s a wonderful subject. It’s like talking about space — it’s all around us and we have to deal with it, and time is something that we have to deal with as well.

“It’s one of the key elements in the universe. It takes a lot of effort to understand it. So it’s not surprising we have these problems where we feel time is getting away from us, or that we end up getting confused by it.”

Humans have been measuring time for thousands of years, beginning with the observation of astronomical bodies such as the sun, the moon and stars. The earliest non-mechanical clock was the water clock, an instrument that measured time with a consistent flow of water in to or out of a vessel. Some academics believe water clocks date back to 4000BC, which would predate sundials by thousands of years.

“Measuring time has always been an important thing,” Joan says.

“First with water clocks, then sundials, mechanical clocks and so on. But our experience of time doesn’t correspond with how these machines operate.

“If we have water dripping regularly out of a box, it falls at a certain rate.

“Humans might experience the same time in a different way. It might take ages for one person, particularly if the drops are coming out very slowly and they’re waiting for each drop.

“But another person might be playing a game, and they feel like time is rushing through and it didn’t take very long (to pass).

“We have to trust the clock mechanism that it’s going at a steady rate independently of us.”

There are plenty of theories as to why our lives seem to speed up the older we get.

One common view is that, the more years we experience, the shorter our perception of these years feels.

For example, one year to a four-year-old is one-quarter of his or her life, and waiting out a quarter of your life for your birthday to come around again would feel incredibly tedious. Whereas a 45-year-old would only wait 1/45th of their life to turn 46.

It’s a terrifying thought, as it gives way to the notion that the time between your fifth and 10th birthday would seem equal to the time between your 40th and 80th birthday — but surely that wouldn’t feel right?

A new explanation from Duke University professor Adrian Bejan looks at the way our eyes and brains receive and process information as a reason for why it feels like time is speeding up with age.

According to Adrian, time is experienced as changes in stimuli, or what we see.

When we age, the rate at which we process the world around us decreases because our vision and brain pathways deteriorate. A child is able to process more information more quickly, feeling like there is more “happening” around them, while an adult is processing the same situation slower and retaining less.

Another interesting part of how humans perceive time is that we feel like it moves quicker when we’re engaged in a new, exciting activity — time flies when you’re having fun.

At the time it feels true, but as memories, our mundane days are the ones that pass by faster. Try and recount, hour by hour, the last time you worked all day, which for some of you might have even been yesterday. Do you remember exactly what you were doing at 10am? At 11am? Or 3pm? Probably not.

What about the last time you did something exciting — say you went to a music festival, a day trip on an overseas holiday or a sports game. You can recall lots of events throughout several hours or the whole day from start to finish.

This proves that, while it might feel like time passed very quickly while you were experiencing it, in hindsight you can recall a dozen or more moments from your adventure. This is because our brain doesn’t record familiar experiences, but it does new ones, which become memories.

Looking back, your weekend getaway or hike through the mountains feels much longer than a day in the office.

It’s a sentiment not lost on Joan, who says she’s still coming to terms with the next stage of her life.

“I’m in my 60s now and it just doesn’t seem right that I should be looking to retirement at this point,” she says.

“Everyone has these experiences of trying to understand what time means and it seems to be just rushing past.

“I think it’s something to do with when things become regular. Having a routine is really good, you can organise daily life and meet deadlines and so on.

“The way I think about it is we should keep our routines, but we should also do something a little bit different, a little bit exciting.

“If you do something new every year, or every week or season, every year would

count and it wouldn’t feel like that whole year has passed very quickly.”

But what about time travel? Will humans ever be able to control time, whether that’s making it go faster or slower?

Joan and a team of academics are working on an experiment to see if time speeds up near a nuclear reactor.

“(It’s based off) a new quantum theory of time developed at Griffith University,” Joan says.

“The reactor core emits copious amounts of subatomic particles called neutrinos that are so nimble they pass right through the earth. The new theory predicts that each neutrino affects the rate at which clocks tick.

“The effect is greater the closer the clock is to the reactor core because the neutrinos are more numerous.

“The way to measure it is to have two reactor clocks, put one near the reactor core and compare them.

“If it turns out to be true, it means it solves a few of these fundamental issues on how we thought about time.

“It would have an impact on the early universe, how it started, and as for controlling time, it doesn’t rule that out. It could open the way up to some kind of time travel, in a very different way to what people had thought about it before.

“We don’t know what were going to find, but this is what scientists do, we have ideas and we go and test them. I’m quite excited about it.”

Another speculation among physicists is time travel through “wormholes”, a theoretical structure that links two points in space time.

Joan says exploring a wormhole could be in the realm of human possibility in the future — we’ll just have to wait until, say, 3020.

“This is something that intrigued people for a long time,” Joan says. “Einstein’s theory of general relativity (is consistent with) wormholes, and wormholes allow you to connect different parts of space and time.

“Those solutions are in theory, they come out in equations, but we’ve not seen them in practice. The closest thing we have is two black holes connected together.

“To manipulate these wormholes would be very difficult. The technology, we’re well behind the years. We’d have to harness energy on a much larger scale, than, say, the Large Hadron Collider.

“I wouldn’t put it past people in 1000 years. It’s unpredictable how technology is developing.”

For now, we’ll have to leave that to the experts, and take solace in the fact that, although it might not seem like it, time is ticking by at a regular rate for everyone.

We’re all given the same amount of minutes in a day, and it’s up to us to make the most of them.

“My way of thinking about it — I trust clocks more than I trust my feeling of time,” Joan says.

“Isn’t it comforting to know that, actually, a year is always the same length? Life might feel like it’s slipping away, but it’s not. I know that a year has taken exactly a year.

“You need to try and deal with that on a psychological level, however that appeals to you, so you could be sure that you aren’t losing time.

“We’re not going to get more out of time. If you use it up, it’s gone unfortunately.”