Thursday, June 18, 2015

Time Flies When You Are Having Fun

Have you ever noticed how time can fly when you are active and working on a deadline?  It seems like you can glance at your watch and huge chunks of time will have flown by.  Yet, when you are waiting for something important, time can take what seems like forever.

I don't think this notion of relativity is something that can be explained by physicists.  It is probably something that can be more easily explained by psychologists.  In fact, according to an article in medical news today, psychologists have studied this phenomenon and there is something to it.  Time flies when you are pursuing goals.

By Infrogmation of New Orleans (Flickr: Old Mantle Clock) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I think some clocks can actually slow down time as well.  For example, we received a nice clock as a wedding present.  It was much like the clock in my grandparents' house and it chimed every hour.  We soon cut the wires to the speaker because the chimes were associated with the extreme boredom I would sometimes feel at their house on a long summer day as a kid.


Today, there are watches that can alter the way you perceive time.  For example, you can get a one handed watch like the slow Jo 15 that only measures hours.

No comments:

Post a Comment