Some people
say that time doesn’t exist. For those of us who have spent our lives by the
clock, this can sound absurd. Well, let’s look at this thing we call time.
Have you
ever noticed that when you wake up, it doesn’t seem as though time elapsed
since you fell asleep? Or that when you’re engrossed in something, time seems
to “fly”? Or that when you remember an event from long ago, it “seems like
yesterday”? Where did time go? Can anything that is real just disappear?
We perceive
time as a mental construct that represents the distance between events. For
example, if we’re waiting impatiently for a bus or for a line of people ahead
of us to move, we perceive time. The more we want a future event to occur, the
longer time seems to “drag”. But, as described in the previous paragraph, on
many occasions we perceive no time at all. So is time real? It seems that time depends
solely on our perceptions, i.e., it has no reality of its own.
