Where does used time go to? If time does keep slipping into the future, why isn’t there a pile of it in the present with us? Today is yesterday’s future. All of yesterday should be here by now. So, where is it?

It does seem to be an odd question; however, have you ever thought about it? Where is all that time that we’ve been through? Is time like a road that we move along and, if so, does somebody behind us get to use the same moments that we’ve already used? How possible is it that time is a collection of disconnected points that we wander around inside of and just think are connected into a coherent narrative?

There is a view of time that is very much, like a road. Every point in space-time is absolutely unique and change happens only as we move from one moment to the next. Reality is, by this view, a 3-d movie in which each moment of time is a frame of 3-dimensional film. Looking at a strip of film, or doing frame-by-frame examinations of digital video, gives you a feel of what this is like for 2-D creatures. This is not the only view.

Another view of time is like a train moving along tracks. The tracks are the moments of time and many realities, each offset enough not to collide, move along these tracks. Each car in the train is a whole universe in itself. This view allows for the reuse of each moment in time.

My final presentation is a degrading view of time. Each moment in time is parted from every other moment in time only by a thin veil if consciousness. With this view, the universe slowly evaporates with each quantum state along the path being a moment in time. It is like being driven up a pipe by the pressure of water behind you. Each floor that you move up is a unit of time.

These are, understandably, not the only views of time. This is a short list of what I can come up with at any moment in time. It does not answer what happens to used time. From our viewpoint, we cannot see the answer. I’ll withhold answering the question until I am allowed to see it.

One final point before I run out of time to play stand up philosopher. A moment of time is of no length to us but it can be of any length in a parallel reality. Any second here can be an hour from a universe what has shorter measurements for time. It is like looking at the pixels on the computer screen. If you lived within the computer screen, then the pixels would be imperceptible because you wouldn’t be able to measure anything smaller. From our viewpoint, the pixels are much larger than the photons by which we see the screen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.