Time loops

Writer: Hazem Ashraf

Editor: Ahmed Ashry 

You know the saying of “Just killing time!” There are some people who think spending their time doing nothing is killing it, but it actually kills them slowly. It’s the idleness in its modern form. Time is a precious resource that we should deal with as careful as we could, as it will end eventually; it could be a table reservation, task deadline, summer vacation, or even life itself!

In this article, we’ll describe how humans looked at the time during different ages and different different paths.

Time always loves to leave its traces, either through wrinkles on our faces or by adding extra rings near a tree bark! Scientists discovered a method through which they could determine the age of a tree, counting the number of rings to indicate how many cycles of seasons that tree has lived,  called Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) .Dendrochronology really helped scientists analyze the past climates that tree has lived through.

From the dawn of human creation, time was interested in documenting time in a way or another, which we call history, in caves, temples, papyrus, …etc. In other words, time transfers a part of itself  into an object, so that people could know what actually happened away from weak memories and to allow future generations to learn about the events that occurred at certain time spaces. Even if the next generations decided to change some of these data to support parties with certain interests, the main idea was pure.

Others use time like a good old friend when they say “It’s a matter of time!” .They believe in time; they’re sure that something will happen in the future. On the contrary, some people advise others not to look back as if time, in its anguish past form, is chasing them, or that time will hunt them if they turn their heads, or maybe turn them into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife!

When we say -Take your time!- we’re giving the other the chance not to push him/herself  by materializing time. In this saying, time is like a gift that you give plenty of it to another, but is time uncountable?

Through years we had many kinds of clocks, hourglass, shadow clocks, and water clocks, all these devices existed to recognize our position in time, this indicates that we – as humans- discovered how precious time is from the beginning of life. Anyways, did you noticed that you’ve just read “our position in time”?

During the years 1907-1915, Einstein developed his General relativity theory, which interweaves the three dimensions of space with time to form a fourth dimension called a space-time dimension, which turns time into a net carrying objects ; a deformation in this net by the mass of objects cause the gravitation time dilation In other words, the same event happens in different times according to the two clocks that have different gravitational potential between their locations.

As we needed to know the time of the day we live, scientists looked for “What time is this universe at?”or, in another words; “How old is our universe age?”.  That means that there should be a reference you could calculate the time from, like searching for the oldest star in the space, and ,by finding it, what comes next can be easily analyzed.

Time flows like water, but even dams can’t stop it. In his painting “The Persistence Of Memory”, Salvador Dalí assumes that time melts, liberating from its stable concept to be more variant and random.

How would you spend your day if there were really no time?