In honor of the 25-year anniversary of recorded time anomalies, let’s take a look into the history of how we have come to understand time as we do today.
The time equation theory seized the public consciousness quite suddenly. At first, it was posts in online forums that were impossible to verify; personal accounts detailed time moving too fast or slow and occasionally jumping around. Then discussion began circulating in the academic world.
Supposedly, a professor received an email around 2 p.m. that was labeled as being sent half an hour afterward. The time stamp was at first presumed to be a technology error until the sender confirmed they had indeed sent it at 2:34 p.m., April 1, 2024.
Philosophers and physicists studied the incident and similar occurrences. “The Temporal Wilderness” was a New York Times Bestseller and detailed common time experiences that proved time did not function as everyone had believed.
Many people claimed they had already suspected this to be true, and they shared a plethora of experiences with time anomalies. When Dr. Angela Frivelton published the time equation hypothesis, the public was eager for an actual explanation, and every news outlet reported on it before it was even proved.
Though everyone seemed to have experienced some level of time modulation before the discovery, most people attributed it to a weird feeling and our own unreliability. There was no evidence because our collective experiences did not count as evidence. We have learned nothing, as there are still experiences that get dismissed on the basis of nonalignment with the current explanations of the world because we pretend to understand it.
Immediately people, organizations and governments worked to not only understand time, but to try and control it.
Time became a new frontier for science fiction. Exploration of physical space belonged to the past, and though time travel was already a staple of the genre, stories began to explore more than just visiting the past or the future.
One of the most revered novels follows a construction worker trying to preserve the time vortex located in his apartment because it allows him to spend extra time with his daughter. Every outcome, every possible way time could work or might be utilized, captivated a wide audience. The incredible influx of stories quickly exhausted the subject, and most people grew sick of the genre.
As years passed—or I should say, as we experienced years, but habits of language are difficult to forget—advancements in the temporal physics field slowed. A group of Norwegian scientists proved the equation. Experiments determined that humanity could not influence time, at least not with current technology.
Though ultimately no tangible advancements were made, a new way of understanding time has offered us new ways of looking at the world. Just like time, nothing in life is as consistent or guaranteed as it seems.
That 1950’s Chick is majoring in general and minoring in convenience.
Featured image courtesy of Pexels.com.
