Our consideration of daylight savings yesterday got me thinking about time in general. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “how much more time do we have to listen this?”—but thinking about time can be a very valuable thing. It certainly was for Albert Einstein.
Working in a patent office in Berne, Switzerland, because he couldn’t get a job in his true passion, physics, Einstein heard the toll of the town clock one evening in May 1905. He gazed up at the tower and wondered to himself: What would happen if a streetcar raced away from the clock tower at the speed of light?
If he was sitting in the streetcar, he realized, his watch would still be ticking. But looking back at the tower, the clock – and time – would seem to have stopped. Six weeks later, he finished his first paper outlining a “special theory of relativity”. Eventually, he would show how space-time, as he called it, affected all manner of things: mass, energy and gravity, eventually contributing to the rise of the nuclear age, space travel, and even our understanding of how stars and celestial bodies interact.
Sometimes, indeed often, it is good to just stop and think and wonder about things…even about time itself. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get to the next thing. After all, if you could leave morning assembly in a streetcar traveling at the speed of light, from your perspective, time here would stop and my little reflection on time would last forever.
Have a wonderful day.
