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This is one of the more challenging bits I have published; it has taken quite a long time to do.
I'll start in the present moment. Well... my actual present moment; I know, time can be tricky.
As I write these words on December 17, 2025 I am seventy-three-and-a-half years old, approximately. Or seen differently, 882 months and 9 days old, approximately. Expressed in minutes, that's 38,671,200 minutes... approximately. I say approximately because, to be accurate, I would need to factor in the moment I drew my first breath on June 8, 1952, until 4:00 o'clock this afternoon. Unfortunately that precision exceeds my grasp because I just don't know what time it was when I took that first gasp of air. Well, it exceeded my grasp, until, out of curiosity and a desire for accuracy, I dove into the archive of my family's life, containing all manner of documents, photos, letters, postcards, old passports, and a maternity magazine given to my mother by the hospital after my birth, and it turns out I was born precisely at 10:27 p.m. As I wrote that sentence yesterday at four o'clock, I was exactly 38,669,373 minutes, or 26,853.73 days, or 73.5718664383562 years old.
After that crazy tidbit of time obsession, allow me to introduce you to the things that set me off on this fascinating journey.
I was reading the New York Times on my iPad and I stumbled on what the Times calls an "Op-Doc". An Op Doc is part of a Times collection of documentaries by independent filmmakers. In this case, the documentary is 9,192,631,770 Hz, by Todd Chandler.
It tells the story of how humans now tell time using atomic clocks.
The clocks use the vibration of cesium atoms to tell time, and they are accurate to within one second in one hundred million years.
But time won't sit still for even a second. The Toronto Star ran an article late last month, on November 27th, reporting that physicists at the University of Toronto made a breakthrough in the science of atomic time-keeping that will make atomic clocks accurate to within one second in three trillion years. That's 217 times longer than what we believe to be the age of the universe.
That should do the trick until time travel becomes how we get around.
Todd Chandler begins his narrative of atomic time-keeping with a conversation he had with his five-year-old son when it was bedtime.
His son said that he couldn't stop playing because the machine inside his body that controls time wouldn't let him. He said "... the system, like, controls your minute." "And what is your minute?" Todd asked his son. "Your minute is like a bunch of little moments, and then the machine puts them all together to make your minute."
In some Buddhist traditions, it is said that a moment is measured as about 1/64th of a finger snap.
Speaking of moments, earlier this year I wrapped up a book I called A year in loving moments.
Each and every day for a year I wrote a love note to my better half. There are two copies of the book. One, this imperfect copy, belongs to me, and the other copy, still imperfect, but much better quality, belongs to Susan. Both I lovingly bound in red leather.
The experience of writing that book required that I spend many minutes each day describing, one, perhaps two, or three, moments of our love story. It's not something I recommend that anyone do; it can be stressful if you fall a couple of days behind or worse, if the moment of love you need to record, initially seems like it might be absent.
The amazing thing though, and the thing that makes me very grateful that I took the chance, and made it successfully through all 365 days, happens when I open the book on the current date and read what I wrote on this date in the past. It sometimes causes tears to well up.
The other amazing thing is that it shines a fascinating light on a whole year of our lives, unlike anything we have done before. A little like a microscope that allows us to peer intimately into time, our time, our moments in time.
Let's shift from the microscopic observation of time, to the way we all measure time. By "we all" I literally mean all of us on this planet. Yes, I realize that there are other ways to measure time without using clocks and watches. I'll come to that later in the narrative.
The vast majority of humans currently on the planet use clocks and watches to tell time. The fascinating thing is that the way we do it is a fairly recent thing.
That doesn't look like anything even remotely modern, does it? It's so old, from our perspective; the language we know is expressed oddly, strangely, and weirdly. Shakespeare wasn't even born. He would take his first breath 25 years later in 1564.
And yet, on the spectrum of humanity, 1539 is like barely yesterday, it's more like this morning, at 10:00 o'clock. The best way I have found, so far, to appreciate the way we measure the passage of time, is this amazing video on Rob's Rob Words Chanel:
Prior to clocks, we measured the passage of time for many thousands of years, from the ancient Egyptians all the way to medieval times, using sundials, hourglasses, marked candles, and water clocks.
Today most of us think we know that time and space unite in four dimensions linked by smooth continuity as opposed to a collection of discrete moments.
If we wish to schedule an event, like a party, we need four coordinates: three dimensions in space, and one dimension in time, somewhere in the future.
That is because we travel on Earth in a combination of three dimensions, and we only travel in time on a single, straight, forward continuum.
But think for a moment of observing events at a sub-atomic level, or think of observing Earth from the moon. Neither of those vantage points reveal the world as we see it daily, nor to they reveal the world seen by generations of our ancestors since the dawn of humanity 300,000 years ago. Nor do they reveal the phenomena we observe, like the cycle of the Earth and Moon in relation to the Sun and the stars, that yield our experience, our concept, of time, and provide the means to measure it.
Without the gift of Earth’s gravity (think of being an astronaut floating in zero gravity) where is up? Where is down?
Now you see where the four dimensions we are so fond of lose the relevance that we take for granted.
No need to freak out and start having nightmares though, because we are blessed to have a very small number of humans who call themselves quantum gravity physicists. If you wish to go beyond where I have taken you, so far, on this brief journey in time, fasten your seatbelt and watch this video where quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli provides the meaning of time in a scientific context, as it is currently understood.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce you to what we think we know about time and the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, and where humanity, and our ability to tell time, sits on that scale. Getting a grip on that kind of spectrum is best performed in an unconventional way.
I attempted to do it using Excel... and Adobe, and Word.
It turns out that creating a substantially accurate depiction of the history of the Earth in the Universe, and of man on Earth, is even more challenging than I had imagined. So I decided to simplify it to make it as easy as A, B, C, and D.
The first span of 50 cells with points A and B at each extremity is a span of 4.54 billion years. The second span of 50 cells with points C and D at its extremities is a span of only 300,000 years.
I recommend watching this much more compelling rendering of that breathtaking span of time.
At the end of that amazing documentary, this thought is spoken as you gaze on the timeline of the universe brilliantly, yet simply, spread out in the Mojave desert:
“Every person you’ve ever heard of existed in this last centimetre of space. And your life would be less than the width of a hair. That is your life against the history of the universe. We are alive for the briefest moment, but that time is a gift from the universe. It’s a tiny moment, but what a moment. It makes you think about how you want to spend your own time.”
And now, in what is my present moment, as I finish writing this post, and for the time being, on December 22, 2025 A.D. at 8h37 a.m., that is the story of a very small portion of my tiny, minuscule, microscopic, sub-atomic place in the universe, and of my ephemeral presence in time.
