Scientists are on a mission. Again. Another mission. Different one. This one, not so much: to boldly go where no-one has gone before, but more: to boldly go when no-one has gone before/during/after/whatever.

Because this is about time. That most illusive of constructs. Time is essentially nothing. And yet everyone gets pissed off when I’m late. So science is going to reconcile this and hopefully people will become more forgiving to my tardiness as a consequence. I even had my watch serviced in anticipation. Because either it was going wrong, losing time and stopping every night at about 3.25am, or… time had actually SLOWED DOWN!!!!! and was stopping every night from 3.25 until I woke up. Well, until I take my first piss of the day and look at my watch. You simply don’t know.

Time can’t actually ‘stop’ because, as I mentioned, it is nothing. What we call ‘time’, implying some kind of absolute and inviolable constant, is in fact an arbitrary way chosen to measure the distance between events. “From the Olympic Games to the World Cup will be one year, 2 months and 14 days… a few hours, couple of minutes and 32.649 seconds”. Events don’t have to be that big. A leaf falling (very small event) takes 4.3 seconds. Big fucking deal. Who cares?

Well science cares, that’s who! But more specifically they worry that in the sub-atomic world of electrons and quarks and shit, there is no time. Or rather, time has no ‘direction’. But when you get bigger, time is highly significant. People age. Plants die. Meat rots. If it wasn’t directional we’d be born at 99 and rejuvenate over the next century, like Brad Pitt did in that silly movie. We’d buy maggot-infested stinky beef (they probably eat that anyway in northern Scandinavia, they eat all kinds of shit up there because there’s nothing else to do) and wait a few weeks until it became “28-day-aged beef” or another three weeks to eat it fairly fresh. Sell-by dates would be fucked forever.

The ‘events’ we choose to ‘set’ time are things like the world revolving on its axis or travelling around the sun. And everything stems from those. An ‘hour’ is just a tool of convenience. Which is my excuse for missing an appointment.

So it is now an interesting question: if the sub-atomic world has no ‘time’, but the bigger world, the macro-world, which is entirely made up of sub-atomic stuff, does, then at what point, or level, or time perhaps, does this happen. That’s worth 2 million quid of anyone’s grant money.

As David Bowie said: ‘Time; inflexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor…’ I think he hit the nail on the head. But when?

Happy seventeenth rotation of the Earth’s axis, of the seventh subdivision of the 12 parts of one revolution around the sun.

A xxxx