Looking for some psychological stimulation to exercise your mind and spice up your day? Try devoting some time to thinking about time. Few people peek down into this particular rabbit hole but we all should, given its prominence in our lives.
What is time? What, exactly, are clocks measuring? Does time even exist outside of our minds? Is time a flowing river we swim in, or an impenetrable fog that imprisons us? Maybe our idea of time is nothing more than a shortcut, a convenient cheat word that evolutionarily young and limited primate brains use to make some sense of change. Perhaps time is a trivial sideshow, the mere plaything of gravity, mass, and motion. Or maybe it is the key to everything.
Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language, an odd fact considering we still don’t have a satisfactory definition of it. And now, awkward contradictions between our common daily experiences and scientific revelations from the quantum realm may be telling us that time is just too complex and too weird for us to grasp anytime soon. Maybe the idea of time in our minds can never be reconciled with the reality of time in our cosmos. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
While working on my latest book, Damn You, Entropy!, 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes, I was surprised to discover that real-world-relevant quotes about time were as plentiful as those about space, robots, aliens, and other obvious sci-fi topics. The following samples were buried inside works of fiction but offer plenty of inspiration to think more deeply........