Time is relative ...

[ChiTownScion]

I had a Dentist appointment this past Friday. It was late in the afternoon, so I was the last patient to be seen. As I was getting ready to leave, my Dentist told me that this was his last day at work (he's retiring and another Dentist will be taking over his practice). My Dad, who was the Principal of a rural school, was instrumental in starting a dental clinic in the school for children who otherwise wouldn't have access to dental care. The young man, right out of dental school, who became our family Dentist, got his start that way and soon opened his own practice. He's been the Dentist for my Dad and Mother, me, my children, and my grandchildren. Four generations of the same family. My Dad was his first patient when he started his practice in 1974, and, quite by coincidence, I was his last patient when he ended his practice this past Friday.

Sounds like a lot of lives were improved not only because this dentist was there, but because your dad opened the door for him to be there. Great story!

 

[Edward]

I think about this all the time, in part because I spend most of my work day with people who are more than half my age. I'm old enough to be the mother of most of the people I work with, and you can't help but be acutely aware of how differently time passes when you're older. I've been in my current job going on ten years now, and that's less than a fifth of my life. But it's half the lifespan for some of these kids -- when I started doing this, already into middle age, they were little kids in grammar school. They came to awareness in the 21st Century -- only the oldest of them have any real sense of life in the 1990s, and none of them can remember a time before the Internet. I am at all times acutely aware of the fact that I was born into an entirely different world than they were.

My closest friend among the staff is twenty-five years younger than I am, and I've learned as much about the 21st Century from her as she's learned about the 20th from me.

I teach final year undergraduate students. These kids are 20/21; for the first time this year I have kids in my class who were born after I started my own undergraduate degree course. I can just about rmeember how forty seemed a million back then.... since I hit it, not so much. As I teach media law, I'm very regularly reminded with the undergrads (less noticeable with the postgrads as most of them are foreign) just how different their pop-culture and 'historical' experience has been. They remember no prime minister before Blair, no president before Clinton (some of them only even recall Bush). Things that are part of my adult living memory are as much history to them as Henry VIII. It is odd sometimes.

None of my undergrads remember a world before the internet - some of them don't even remember dial-up access - or tobacco advertising, or a lot of things that were a reality in my experience. Fadcinating sometimes, but also a bit scary. My brother's kids live in a world as different from mine as was the world of my earliest remembrances in 1976 from my parents' first memories at the tail end of the forties.

The other comparator that stuck with me relates to Jimi Hendrix. I remember marvelling when I learned that Jimi's Hussar Pelise was an original, from the Crimean campaign. For him in 66, though, the Crimean War was the same distance as the early 30s for us now.

 

[sheeplady]

I used to teach a unit on how business culture is affected after a crisis in an upper division undergraduate course. I used to have students do companies in the World Trade Center that had survived the 9/11 attack; places like Cantor Fitzgerald.

I stopped assigning those companies because I found that the younger my students were when it happened, the less the assignment made sense to them. They'd had no memory of flying before 9/11. No memory of every phone lines being jammed. No memory of the confusion of that day. Because they didn't know life BEFORE that, they couldn't understand that single event fundamentally changed so many aspects of our everyday lives.

Unless a student had a personal connection to the event; I found that most of my students assumed life "had always been this way." I guess it it similar to when the Berlin Wall fell to my generation. I was a child when it fell, but because I had family in the communist block, it was remarkably personal to me when it happened. I imagine it isn't so for other people who were children at the time and didn't live there or know someone who did.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

That's the point of my original post. The war in Vietnam is further in the past for my grandchildren than World War I was to me when I was my grandchildren's age. That's why I think it's interesting to think about how younger people view "the past."

And now many Vietnam veterans are about the same age that World War I veterans were during the Vietnam War.

 

[GHT]

Well, I was.

View attachment 24394

Some few years ago now, I had my photo taken on a late Victorian camera, complete with powder flash, wearing a confederate officer's uniform. It was in a booth on the former Chattanooga Terminus Station. Damned if I can find that picture.

My reenacting days are over. It got to the point where I looked a bit silly playing a 28 year old Federal regimental surgeon in my mid 50's. I'd occasionally galvanize and don my grey Secesh uniform if the event called for it, but around here, the Rebs tended to be - and I can't think of any way to diplomatically state this- authenticity challenged, especially in the medical impression category.

Many great memories from those days in the Hobby.... but it was time to bow out gracefully. Too many tubby old geezers portraying soldiers in a war that was, for the most part, fought by men in their teens and twenties, and too many beer bellies for armies supposedly subsisting on parched corn and hard rations. Did meet some fine people, however, and made a lot of lasting friendships.

Have you heard of The Sealed Knot? They are re-enactors of The English Civil War. They take it very seriously, but beer belly foot soldiers do look amusing!

 

[ChiTownScion]

Have you heard of The Sealed Knot? They are re-enactors of The English Civil War. They take it very seriously, but beer belly foot soldiers do look amusing!

A couple of my American CW re-enactor pards used to regularly travel up to Canada to play Roundhead pikemen in a Battle of Naseby event.

 

[Stearmen]

Here's one for some of you. How many remember when 2001 A Space Odyssey was released in 1968? I actually saw it in 1969, and I remember talking to my friends about what it would be like 33 years later. It seemed so far in the future, it was almost imposable to imagine. Now, 1969 seems like ancient history!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was very interested in the space program when 2001 came out, but my mother wouldn't let me see it. I had panicked watching "Planet of the Apes" and ran up to the projection booth to watch the rest of the picture with my uncle, and she figured I'd had enough science fiction for a while.

I think every kid, at one point, figured out how old they'd be in 2000 -- I'd be 37, which sounded ancient. As it happens, on my 37th birthday in The Year Two Thousand, I planted a poplar tree in my yard. That tree is now thirty feet tall, and is dying, and I'm thinking I'll have to have it cut down this summer. There's a metaphor there, but I hate to think of what it is.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I teach final year undergraduate students. These kids are 20/21; for the first time this year I have kids in my class who were born after I started my own undergraduate degree course. I can just about rmeember how forty seemed a million back then.... since I hit it, not so much. As I teach media law, I'm very regularly reminded with the undergrads (less noticeable with the postgrads as most of them are foreign) just how different their pop-culture and 'historical' experience has been. They remember no prime minister before Blair, no president before Clinton (some of them only even recall Bush). Things that are part of my adult living memory are as much history to them as Henry VIII. It is odd sometimes.

I've spent a little time in the Middle East for my work, especially in Kuwait. American presence is still strong there, in business, in culture and the US military. There is a whole generation of people there, perhaps half the country, who are married, working and have kids of their own who don't really understand why there is the American connection. To them, the US military has always been in Kuwait, and some have heard of the Iraqi Invasion and the Gulf War, but it has no meaning to them.

 

[GHT]

[FONT="]Time really is relative, and our concept of “how long ago” things were is interesting when you stop and think about it in this kind of context. [/FONT]

We often measure time in an unconscious way, for example: The birth of your first born, their first day at school, their last day at school. Higher education, job, marriage, your first grandchild. Trivial events to others but monumental in your own life. These events are like milestones in your life, they not only measure your time on this planet, they make you realise just how quick it goes. Unless you have nothing purposeful to do, then time drags by.

Is time the fourth dimension, is space the fifth? What blows me away about the concept of time is that it is a system of measure for the finite, yet space has to be infinite, if it isn't, what's at the end of it, and why doesn't our universe fall into that void? I try not to dwell on that, it could make me become a candidate for the funny farm, but I can't help wondering exactly: What is the concept of time?

 

[HudsonHawk]

Is time the fourth dimension, is space the fifth?

Space is the first three dimensions.

What is the concept of time?

Time doesn't exist without space. There was no "before", there will be no "after".

 

[Stearmen]

Space is the first three dimensions.



Time doesn't exist without space. There was no "before", there will be no "after".

To quote Jame's neighbors, "wow, heavy man!"

 

[GHT]

"wow, heavy man!"

Yep! https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=p...eekmythology.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FAtlas;450;525

 

[jamespowers]

To quote Jame's neighbors, "wow, heavy man!"

Nah, that would be your populace there:

 

[Stearmen]

Yep! https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=p...eekmythology.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FAtlas;450;525

:eusa_clap