RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 145, 15 March 1939, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights On Current Events (By Kickshaws). A critic declares that an open season should be instituted for shooting motor-cyclists at two in the morning. As a method to diminish night noises, we feel the scheme has certain undesirable features. * * ♦ A bottle found on the New Zealand coast is stated to have been in the sea for 10 mouths. This can only be explained around the New Zealand coasts by the fact that the bottle was empty.

Modern girls, it is claimed, won’t live to be 95 because they haven’t enough clothes; which seems to indicate that longevity, like salesmanship, is largely a matter of address.

Gandhi’s powers are stated to approach the occult because he can say “I will sleep for 20 minutes” and does so exactly. This may be attributable to the occult, but it is a fact that many people have a peculiar sense of time. For example, there are people who can. go to sleep sure in the knowledge that they can rely upon themselves to wake up at any specified time. Usually they do so to within a few minutes. Our sense of time, however, is usually badly astray regarding small periods of time. Get a friend to time your estimate of the time occupied by one minute. Most people will be surprised when they find that their estimate varies anywhere between 20 seconds and half a minute. Actually, one minute is a longer period, of time than we imagine. In the same way, one second is longer than most people estimate. If one counts one, two, three, four, five at a normal reading pace it occupies about a second. In contrast, there are people who, when asked the time, can give it at any time of the day correct to a few minutes.

Actually Gandhi’s uncanny sense of time may be caused rather by elementary powers than by powers beyond the average person. The sense of time is very strongly developed in many types of extremely low forms of life, not that we suggest Gandhi is a low form of life. For example, there thrives on the large coral reefs of tropic seas a creature known as the palalo worm. At certain times these worms crawl backwards out of their holes and break off their body just behind the head. The head disappears back into the hole in the reef and begins to grow a body again. The body adrift contains eggs which are set free. The amazing thing that involves the sense of time is that this curious action takes place with the regularity of clockwork once a year in December on the night before the full moon or the new moon. Furthermore, on the Roscoff sands there lives a small worm which always comes to the surface when the sea is on the ebb, but disappears exactly at the change o£ -the tide with an accuracy not surpassed by expert estimates. If'these worms are placed in an aquarium with a sandy bottom not affected by the tides the worms will appear at the exact time that the tide should be on the ebb, disappearing when the sea from which they are taken is on the change of the tide.

We are apt to regard time as a matter of clocks and watches. Maybe for this reason we get a wrong idea of time. We also are apt to regard time as something that flows into the future. Many uncivilized tribes have a totally different conception of time. They consider thah time flows in the opposite direction and are quite incapable of understanding our conception of time. There are many thoughtful persons who consider that time itself is there fur us to pass through. The position in time at any given instant is a matter entirely between our bodies and our mental state. Under certain conditions we may change our mental state, as in dreams or under occult influence, and be present mentally at a different positiou in time. This may be either before or after what we usually term “the present.” In that way we may dream or otherwise define things that have not happened in cur time, though they are there somewhere in time or we may go back to things that have happened. The normal state for this to occur so say some experts is when asleep, though the brain at birth is in a stage of development ready to accept any position in time that presents itself. It is usually pain that snaps it back to what we call the present moment, and, a condition accepted as normal.

Folk iu this world have agreed almost since man was man to interpret time by the movements of the world and other heavenly bodies. Unfortunately for rhe clockmakers, this world of ours hands out time based on the repetition of sequences on au ellipse, instead of a circle. We have adapted this lack of consideration for clockmakers by giving ourselves a sort of synthetic time corrected for this . and other little variations. In contrast, if the-earth were moonless, kept the same face always to the sun (as does Mercury), had its polar axis perpendicular to its orbit, wo would have no time as we know it. There would be no days, months or seasons. We would be practically unconscious of the years. Yet we would still grow old, and pass through the normal biological phases of a living thing. It would seem, therefore, that in addition to that which we accept as time there must be another sort of time. Rearrange the astronomical conditions of the world, and our philosophy of time would become unrecognizable. Time on Jupiter or Arcturus, or in the distant galaxies would involve quite different dissections.- It may be for this reason that we are confronted with such baffling problems where things much greater or much (

smaller than our ken are concerned.

Our somewhat curious system of keeping time ignores all outside factors except the rotation of the earth and its journey round the sum Yet we try to resolve the entire stellar system into units of time which we have evolved entirely for home use. This problem is further complicated by the fact that it is impossible to come to any understanding as regards our own "now” and the “now,” say, of a distant star in our own galactic system. The light which brings news of these distant stars set forth 1,090,000 years ago. We are therefore up against the curious fact that so far as they and their times are concerned we must always be 1,000,000 years behind. As regards yet more distant stars, all that we or* our descendants for the next 3000 years shall know about those stars is on its way somewhere within our own galactic system. It is not without the bounds of possibility that somewhere there lies other systems with peihaps the curious faculty of emitting notification of happenings before, not after, they occur. We shall then have concrete examples of the inscrutable past the mysterious now, and the unknown future.