It's All Relative

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Despite my best intentions from the outset of every day, I invariably leave the posting of my trivia in these pages until the very last possible minute, which I guess sums up the modus operandi of my life generally: deadlines I feel instinctively are there to be pushed firmly against, in order to gird the loins, put fire in the belly and sweeten the eventual closing of the chase. O! but were life itself were so urgent and so pressing. Oft-times true in usually distressing manner, but for the most part as commonplace and I would hazard, mundanity in itself. Tonight's scribble is no exception. Up against the wire yet again with nary an idea to my name.

However, I was reading a piece in my partly-read Summer Edition of The New Statesman about time. Time, of course is something I return to time - ahem - and again here, and I could be accused of being so exercised because of my advancing age and the rapidly contracting reservoir of my personal supply of the stuff; but it's simply not so. I've been fascinated by time, its passage and recording, and our perception of it from a very early age. Over the course of my now fairly extended life, I have been acutely aware of the elasticity of our perception of time's progression; particularly on a personal, daily basis.

We each experience time subjectively [many blog posts passim] and the NS piece related the meme floating around the EtherWeb that CERN's operation of the Large Hadron Collider is somehow affecting the passage of time for the human race. As usual of course, this is merely, politely, nonsense. And like most conspiracy theories, it replaces the easiest and most plausible explanation for a given phenomenon with the most lurid and complex one imaginable. The tenor of the NS piece was as measuredly and politely scathing as one would hope. Thankfully...

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