Day: September 30, 2017

Recently, a colleague of mine told me about a meeting with our director, during which the director said, “I don;t care about what happened before. That’s history and I want to move on.” The colleague politely informed the director that he better care about history because we are making the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. The arrogance of our director’s statement doesn’t surprise me. In fact, it’s reflective of his attitude for the past three years as he’s come in and tried to “fix’ all the problems he’s perceived throughout his career in government service. That’s the irony of the whole thing–he is reflecting on history in his effort to transform the agency, and our community, yet he specifically and conclusively states that he doesn’t care about history. But history matters.

I’ve taken to reading and listening to historical material as I prepare for a new assignment. It’s been refreshing and enlightening to learn more about things I thought I already knew well. It’s also opened my eyes even more clearly to the fact that history continues to repeat itself and simultaneously create slight modifications to culture, society, laws, customs and morals that have allowed us, and simultaneously forced us, to evolve in ways we don’t understand without reflections on the past.

History also informs us, as human beings who have lived a specific period of time (for example, 50+ years), in ways that allow us to understand a scenario differently than others (e.g. our children or friend’s children) who have less than half our experience (aka history). This experience allows us to make decisions that are better informed, but also drives us crazy when our lesser experienced counterparts pass up a seemingly no-brainer decision. History matters and sometimes we won’t recognize why until it becomes history.

The first time I heard the term “time dilation” was while watching the new Star Trek series (the one with Patrick Stewart vice William Shatner) and I wondered what it meant. The theory goes like this, time moves at different speeds for two different observers relative to the gravitational field exerted upon the observers.  If you are a fan of science fiction then you have read about or watched this idea manifested in many ways. In the 1979 movie, The Black Hole, a ship is stranded near the event horizon of a black hole and the crew are literally frozen in time due to the time dilation effect that a black hole produces.

Another good sci-fi use of time dilation is in the book The Forever War by Joel Haldeman. The protagonist serves as a soldier in an intergalactic war (that’s not the main story line – just the backdrop) and due to frequent faster-than-light trips around the galaxy, stays young while the Earth and his family ages and the circumstances behind the war change. Interesting reading and recommended.

Recently I’ve also experienced time dilation. I remember when I was young the time between holidays seemed like ages – more or less glacial – in how slow time moved. I also remember that from the time school started to Christmas might as well have been a thousand years. Now that I’m a bit older – the time between September 1 and December 25^th seems like a blink of an eye. The time dilation effect seems to have an age factor as well. Time moves at different speeds for two different observers, not only based on the gravitational field exerted upon them, but also their relative age.

The authors of this blog often comment at our get-togethers how fast time seems to move. I remember my grandmother talking about how fast the year went by when I was a kid and thinking, “is she nuts?”  She wasn’t – it was the time dilation effect due to age. Advice to our children – enjoy how slow time moves while you are close to the teens and twenties event horizon.