By Erik Dolson
Distance doesn’t matter. It’s all a matter of time.
“It’s so far,” says a child avoiding Thanksgiving. What she means is, “It will take so long to get there.” Of course, she might mean “we’ll have to be there for hours!”
But the significance is about time, not the distance.
We know that “long” is a unit of distance. But it’s also verb related to desire. “I long for you,” might imply “you” is far away, but it really represents a seemingly “long” period of time since “You went away.”
Of course, that kind of longing can’t represent distance, because then a yard stick “three feet long” might become a meter if it was longing … for … long… enough.
When we calculate what’s fair as a place to meet, we don’t just consider actual miles. Not when there are mountain passes to traverse, ferries to negotiate, all-but-certain traffic jams through the cities to withstand: Two hundred miles is three hours on an empty I5 in Oregon at 1:00 a.m., maybe seven hours on a Friday in winter during a torrential rain at 4 p.m. through Everett/Seattle/Tacoma/JBLM. With no accidents.
Two hundreds miles for each? How fair is that? Still, distance is significant. If there was no distance, then it would take no time to cross it.
This odd interplay between distance and time may be more fundamental. I read that everything is a wave, just with frequency inverse to mass (size). So, you and I have a much higher frequency than an electron. Or something like that.
But then, frequency itself is a matter of repetition over time, right? Wavelengths in our music are defined by oscillations per second, and harmonious better line up! Even the most accurate clocks now get their ticks and tocks based on the frequency of, I forget, the cesium atom?
But time is the denominator for frequency. If space and time aren’t immutably locked together, if time stretched without taking space along with it wouldn’t the frequency change?
An old favorite joke: “God created time so everything doesn't happen all at once.” I’m thinking that was George Carlin. Another that also sounds like Carlin from the 70s: “Guy puts a cup of instant coffee into the microwave and goes back in time.”
The humor in that depends so much on being around when microwaves were introduced. Which was a long time ago. (smile) Time helps us take things out of context, always required for a laugh.
But we still don’t have a handle on what time really is, unrelated to space. We used to, but we were just fooling ourselves, cave-wo-men who thought fire came from the gods. Of course, depending on your sect, maybe it does.
Well, cesium atom or not, if vibration frequency defines our seconds and hence our weeks, years and centuries, then time and space damn well better be constant. Because if the atom doesn’t travel as far in the same unit of time, then … wait a minute! … if it doesn’t travel as far, then it won’t take as long, but how long it takes is defined by how far it goes…
This ink spreads across my afternoon as if dripped onto a paper towel, even to things not normally bound by space and time.
Something is significant to the extent it causes change. If it causes change for an individual, it is significant to the individual. If it is socially significant, it causes change to society. Often what changes may be a matter of actual distance. Location, relocation, accessibility.
But that significance is often because the change happened more suddenly than we expected, with both the rate of change and our expectations depending on our perception of what “sudden” actually is.
We figure it out. Eventually.
It’s just a matter of time.