Pondering the Inexistence of Absolute Time

Albert Einstein, a hero for many reasons, including, perhaps, his humanity and his feet of clay. His disrespect for authority and precedent. His tendency to crystallize what others sought to calcify.

But what about time? Just how relative is it? Is it just a “convention” as David Hume might have expressed it, if he’d lived today? Did Hume ever consider that? It would not be surprising.

I’ve recently dared to be struck by what seems an important inconsistency in the way I, at least, perceive the Theory of Relativity’s rejection of the concept of “Absolute Time”.

I can hear a reader snickering, … “watching too much Big Bang”.

I wonder if Einstein would have praised my daring or ridiculed my ignorance. Probably both.

Specifically, I ask myself, … “if Absolute Time is inexistent, then how can we calculate the age of the Universe?” From somewhere in my head I hear an echo of a memory smirk, … “It’s relative”.

Still, and I beg the reader to pardon my ignorance or my cognitive inadequacies, or both, … “how do these two concepts reconcile?

Is time something leaking in from another dimension, the way some perceive to be the case with gravity under M Theory?

I delve into Jungian Universal Subconscious phantasies and ask “does anyone have any good answers they might be willing to share”?

But all I hear are the echoes of many souls whispering, … “not you Sheldon, not you”.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved