Saturday, April 7, 2012

Biking at the Speed of Light

Took a long bike ride yesterday from Northwest Washington to Needwood Lake in Rockville.  Fifty miles round-trip in just over four hours.  On the way back, it occurred to me that after a certain point, time had been suspended for me.  Each moment was part of the next and the whole ride was as one unified experience, one moment in time.  Each point I had passed was "just now" no matter how many miles had speed under my wheels since.

This doesn't happen on my shorter bike rides but seems to kick in after 15 miles or so.  Einstein explained that at the speed of light, time stops.  It had stopped for me at a considerably slower pace.

Maybe this is how to unify quantum physics and relativity?  For quantum physics, reality is subjective in the sense that its many possibilities don't become one thing until observed.  Einstein thought of his science as objective.  The speed of light is the same everywhere, independent of the observer.  But time is experienced subjectively.  It passes slow or fast depending on how we feel it.  And biking at our speed of light can suspend our experience of time entirely.  Time too doesn't become anything specific until we observe it.

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