What is Time?

A professor attempts to make a class think outside the box.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

This short story is presented for personal entertainment only. Commercial and all other use is expressly prohibited.

(c) 2010-2017 Robert Horseman, All rights reserved.

“Who can tell me what time is?” Someone in the back yells, “Three-oh-five PM!” Professor Hauberk stares impassively at the young man a long moment before saying, “Thank you for that astute response. Can anyone else do better? It should not be difficult. What is time?” This time the room is utterly silent. “Not an easy question to answer, is it? Why is time difficult to define? We experience it every moment of our lives.” Hauberk is an Professor Emeritus, a retired tenured professor who doesn’t have to lecture at all to receive his pension. But instead of sitting idly at home watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, he gives fascinating lectures about once a month to anyone who wants to attend. I read about him and his lectures in my high-school’s on-line newspaper, and convinced my parents to let me come. Needless to say, they were shocked to hear their sixteen year old daughter ask to attend a lecture at the local college. Oddly enough, his lectures are hot tickets. Every seat is filled for tonight’s installment, and at least thirty people stand behind the back row of seats. I would have asked to come anyway out of simple curiosity, but the title of this lecture, “The Morphology of Time,” caught my interest. A young woman in the front raises her hand. “It’s intangible. We cannot see it, we cannot touch it.” He nods. “Quite true. But we can measure it, can we not? I bet every one of you has a timepiece on their person, either a watch or a cell phone. Einstein once said, ‘the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’ Does that help?” I raise my hand, and he nods in my direction. “Yes miss?” All heads turn in my direction, and I cannot control the blush I feel on my face. “It sounds like Einstein was saying that we exist on a timeline that doesn’t define the now, the present. It’s all the same.” “If that were true, couldn’t I pick any moment I want to experience and do it again?” He was looking straight at me, and I swallowed hard before answering, “But if there is no present, you can’t choose one.” He nodded. “That’s an interesting notion, but it doesn’t feel true to the human experience, does it? There is a present, a now, a moment in time. It’s here and it’s gone, replaced by the next moment.” He raises his hands and his eyes widen. “Could Einstein be… wrong?” When no one responds, he says, “Einstein was a theorist. Of course he could be wrong, and if he was, where does that leave us? Again I ask you, what is time?” The same guy who yelled at the beginning of the lecture shouts, “Fleeting!” The professor grins broadly, points at the young man and says, “Right! Excellent. Time is fleeting. We inhabit time, but don’t control it’s flow. It speeds along at the same immutable speed, and we’re just along for the ride, right?” It was obvious to me that this professor loves to teach. He’s exuberant, exhorting the class to use their heads. His swinging gray ponytail hints at an interesting past, and I vow to find out more about him later. I am enthralled; there’s no other word for it. I know such natural teachers exist, but I’ve never experienced one for myself. “Let me ask you another question,” he continues. “Most of your classes are an hour long. Do they all feel like an hour?” When everyone remains silent he says, “If you don’t engage people, I’m going to point to random individuals and demand an answer. Do all classes feel like an hour?” He points to a scruffy looking man in the third row. The guy looks briefly shocked to be called upon, but says, “Not macro-economics. That class feels like an eternity.” “Excellent. Yes, it feels to you like much more than an hour.” He smiles. “It would to me too, but I will bet there are others who would say it feels much less than an hour. Do you agree?” He points to the same guy. “I suppose.” “So why do two people experience the same class is such different ways?” Now he points to me. Again all eyes turn in my direction, and I flush again. “I suppose it has to do with interest,” I say. “To someone interested in a lecture, time seems to fly by. To someone bored to tears, it takes forever.” He nods. “Ah, then I could make this lecture seemed like an eternity to every one of you. What power I have. I could just stand in front and talk in a slow monotone. The second hands on all your watches would slow to a crawl, right? No? Then it’s just perception we are talking about, not time itself, and we haven’t answered my original question. What is time? Let me ask it this way. At the beginning of class, mister exclamation-point back there,” he gestures to the guy who liked to yell, “said three-oh-five PM.” We all remember that, right? So where is that moment now?” A tall girl with Slavic cheekbones raises her hand. “In our memories?” “A copy, certainly, like a video recording, but that’s not the event itself, is it? Where is that moment? In past right? And completely inaccessible to us mere mortals. Why can’t we go back? There’s a date I’d really like to relive in nineteen sixty-five.” That brought smiles to quite a few faces. A young man with the barest wisp of a mustache raises a hand and says, “Causality. Events cause subsequent events. Entropy is always increasing, and you can’t corral it back in the bottle.” Hauberk nodded. “For the rest of you who don’t know what entropy is, he refers to randomness and disorder, which is always increasing. For example, leave a house unattended for twenty years, and it will rot away. Steel rusts. Wood burns. Increasing entropy defines the arrow of time, and therefore always points in one direction, into the future. Is that a satisfactory answer to my question?” He points to a kid in the front row who couldn’t be more than twelve. “I didn’t get that. All I know is what my Dad always says. Time is what you make of it.” The professor clapped politely a few times. “Well done. Many of you, having heard my reputation as a crazy physicist, came here expecting me to explain time; what it is and what we can do with it. You may have noticed that I didn’t bring any notes to this lecture. The truth is, I came here hoping you would tell me what time is. Physicists and philosophers have debated it for centuries, couching their explanations in terms of physics or metaphysics. None of that feels right, feels genuine. To me, time feels like a river flowing around me. I can get caught in eddies, sitting at my desk reminiscing about an old flame from my youth, or I can go zip-lining for twenty seconds that feels like an hour. This young man has hit the nail on the head. Time is a resource, people. Don’t waste it. Class dismissed.”

•••••The End •••••