I was thinking this morning about “wasting time” and what that really means. I wondered if it is actually possible to “waste” time. Does time really work that way? Do we really know how time works at all?
All of this led me to read some papers on the subject of time, different theories from different scientists.
One began with setting aside the notion of Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks.
I’ll try to explain things in the easiest way. But it looks at our existence in the order of something similar to an arrow. How an arrow will shoot one way, but we can’t get it to back up.
That means the past is different from the future in the way that time goes. As it is, we can remember the past, but we don’t remember the future. There are things that happen in this world — all of them really — that are irreversible processes.
The example they gave was that things happen and you can’t unhappen them. You most certainly can turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.
And then our time process, the one we understand and are familiar with, the eggs turning into omelets, or milk turning sour in our refrigerators, these time events are linked to entropy.
Entropy was one of my favorite things to think about when I was of the college-going age. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy goes up with time. Things become more disorderly as we go along. It tends to grow.
At any rate, the paper went on to talk about our place here. Where we are sitting right now in the timeline of the Universe. How it started some 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order. How at that time, there was extremely low entropy. But what wound things up in the beginning and set them going? Why did the disorder begin in the first place? Is there more than the Universe? A Multiverse? A place beyond the beyond, controlling this?
The whole thing gave me a different perspective on time — especially the part about the events in this world that are irreversible processes. Our entire lives are irreversible processes, as I see it.
Which brings me back to wasting time. Can time be used or expended carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose? Especially in this notion of the arrow of time?
I’ve heard it said so many times before after someone sees a bad movie, reads a disappointing book, or eats at a substandard restaurant. They say, “Well, that’s “x-amount” of time that I’ll never get back.”
Or maybe they’ve worked a jigsaw puzzle that took 15 hours to complete, and they say, “I can’t believe I wasted all that time putting together that picture of Hello Kitty.”
The other saying in this, when someone is dealing with a troubling or dispiriting situation — “Life is too short.”
Or is it all a part of the purpose? Or perhaps the great non-purpose? Is time wasted or merely on its entropic path? A path of creating irreversible processes. Our occurrences.
Time is moving in that direction, the forward kind, and we are moving with it.
The omelet can’t be made back into the egg. We think.
But there are steps that go in order when making that omelet. Pulling the egg out of the refrigerator. Taking a pan from the cupboard, gathering the butter and the other ingredients, and on and on and on. If one step is missed, the outcome of the omelet changes. Even if it seems like a “waste of time” to add the milk and whisk the eggs.
Is time really wasted or just part of the irreversible process?
Make a good omelet today. In whatever way that matters to you. Because you, are a good egg.
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“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin
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“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
― Charles Darwin
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“Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “then waste it asking riddles that have no answers.”
“If you knew time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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The timeline, and the disorder of the order.
