What Is TIME???

WHAT EXACTLY IS TIME?

THE answer is, we simply do not know. Time, goes the joke, is Nature's way of stopping everything happening at once. Time defines our lives, it is how we measure our very being. Yet as to what it is, we are as in the dark as the ancients. That is not to say that we do not understand what time does. Physicists such as Albert Einstein have come up with some great insights as to the properties of time. We give it a symbol and plug it into various equations and it works very well. But that, again, does not tell us what time actually is. Is it a 'river', which flows from past to future? If so, a river of what? What causes it to flow, and what sets the rate at which it flows? Would it be possible to swim, as it were, upstream, and travel through time? Could we stop the river flowing altogether? Science fiction writers say all this is possible, as, surprisingly, do most physicists. But before we build a time machine, we will need to get a grip on what this most elusive and slippery thing actually is. Ultimately, all these mysteries will be solved.

(Ref: Mumbai Mirror)

Can I Live for EVER???

CAN I LIVE FOR EVER?

Possibly, but not yet. Ageing — and particularly ways of stopping the process — is one of those issues that many scientists would rather not talk about because it raises disturbing moral and ethical questions. For a start, on a practical level, we do not know what ageing really is. We take it for granted that our bodies wear out as we grow older, yet this is not really the case. For the first 20 years of our lives, our bodies grow stronger, more efficient, more resistant to disease. It is only later that things start going wrong. Why? According to the evolutionary theory of ageing, our bodies start to fail us because in the ‘wild’ we would expect to die anyway, at the age of 30-50, from cold, starvation, an attack by sabretoothed tigers and so on. There was no point in our having evolved to cope with the diseases of old age, if we were never going to live that long anyway. But that doesn’t really tell us what is going on when we age, what drives the genetic ‘clock’ that makes skin dry, our hair go grey and our bones brittle. Only when we understand what truly drives these processes will we stand a chance of combating them. And then, of course, we will be faced with a huge moral problem: do we really want to live in a world where some people will never grow old? Or in a world where (inevitably) only a lucky elite will be able to afford the treatments to allow this to happen?

(Ref: Mumbai Mirror)

Am I The Same Person???

AM I THE SAME PERSON I WAS A MINUTE AGO?

WHAT a strange question! Yet this goes to the heart of one of the most vexed questions in the whole of science and philosophy - that of identity. On the face of it, the answer is obvious: of course I am. But think again. Ten minutes ago, every cell in your brain was doing something different to what it is doing now. Every few years, your body is mostly replaced. If it is possible to rebuild the burned Cutty Sark, using new timbers, and many other new parts, is it really the same ship that plied the seas 150 years ago? Purists say ‘No’. But if that is the case, then you are certainly not the same person you were when you were a child or a baby. This question shows the way we think about ourselves runs contrary to what is actually happening. And it has practical implications: Should people be held responsible for crimes they committed decades previously? How do we establish someone’s identity? Is it DNA or something more nebulous? For what it is worth, it could be concluded that our identity is largely a fiction. We are the same person through time only in the same way that a river is the same river as it flows down the same course. But of course the water, the ripples and eddies, change every second.

(Ref:Mumbai Mirror)