What Is Your Age?
I was born on 1 January 2000, at 7:41 pm. My age at this exact moment is 18 years 11 months 8 days 23 hours and 34 minutes.
But my age is not that.
I am not an exact number. Nobody is.
We all are defined by this planet we live on, even our age. You are not a number. You are the movements of this planet around our sun and on its own axis.
Maybe our age will be different when we will live on a different planet. Maybe you’ll become just 2 years old or 200.
But it is not about our age, it’s about time and how we perceive it. We started from the rough idea of days and nights and we divided our time into minutes and seconds to represent those cycles. We filled pages with numbers to denote the cycle of seasons and later on, at a much larger scale, the revolutions of the earth around another massive object, the sun. Although the sun also revolves around the centre of a still larger system known as the milky way galaxy, however, to apply those numbers (230 million years/cycle) into our miniscule lives is just too funny.
We then moved on to a much more scientific view, where we started defining the SI units of measurements with more reliable and stable systems. The kilogram defined by the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 kg⋅m2⋅s−1 and the second by the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom (at a temperature of 0 K). (It’s ok if you skipped this part.) There are other measures such as Metre, Ampere, Kelvin, etc, whose values are also now rigorously and systematically defined.
But even after all this, for a layman, time and space are still difficult to describe, much less to know their fundamental properties. After all, time is nothing but just a series of events occurring one after the other in only one direction. If the occurrences stop, time stops and if the direction changes, time reverses. And space too is much more complex than one thinks. At the most accurate and precise point, it may be just n number of atoms of a particular element stacked one after the other on a single straight line over an even plain. Or even an accurate number of subatomic particles too. Although we are quite deficient in terms of technology to perform either of them. But what if, on the other hand, the atoms itself change shape/size. What if space itself expands like a stretchable fabric. Maybe what we fundamentally call distance, itself fluctuates over time. And maybe, in some different point in space and time, the definitions of all these units are changed so dramatically that we may not be able to understand their properties at all. Or maybe time itself vanishes, making space nothing but just one mere dimension of an incomplete world.
And this goes on, stretching across more dimensions and much larger or smaller scales.
But what is essential for us to understand is how we define ourselves. Why do you think that your past is at your back and not on your right-hand side? And why do you think space is three dimensional like a box or a room and not like a sheet of paper? Why is that we have so specific notions of defining us and our ages? Is your age, n number of events occurring one after another until this very point? Is your age, a point in space at a particular state of time? Are you defined by a unit, so fundamentally free of any other physical property of this universe that it becomes a universal constant with zero uncertainty or are you defined by a naive attempt of humans to understand a highly complex system in which its species live?
As your birthdays approach, try to think about your age and how you define it. And try to think about the notions and philosophies on which we base our lives. And how we accept so easily, such half understood realities of life, not even knowing why we actually put burning candles on cakes just to blow them off later.
