President’s Message: Forget What You Know

As human beings, we’re unsure of many things, but some things we know. Or do we? Let’s look at something that we are fairly sure of: time. We tend to think of time as something that passes at a consistent and measurable rate from past to future. Yet that is not factually true. Scientist Albert Einstein said that time is only an illusion, however persistent. In his song “Secret O’ Life,” singer/songwriter James Taylor writes, “The thing about time is that time isn’t really real / It’s just your point of view.”

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli contends that time is merely a perspective, rather than a universal truth. It’s a point of view that humans share because of our biology and evolution, our place on Earth, and the planet’s place in the universe. Here are some measurable facts that back this up:

• A year at the top of Mount Everest is 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.
• A clock at Everest’s top and another at sea level would be off from each other by a day and a half over the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet due to differences in gravity.
• Astronaut Scott Kelly was born several minutes after his twin brother Mark, but after spending 340 days in space, Scott returned to Earth 5 milliseconds younger than Mark.

Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that time is affected by both speed and gravity. If you were to spend a year on a train circling Earth at nearly the speed of light, everyone else on Earth would have aged around 10 years by the time you got off. And spending time near something with massive gravity, like a black hole, would cause time to move very slowly compared with anywhere else. Einstein also suggested three ways that time travel could be achieved: by traveling faster than the speed of light, utilizing wormholes to connect two points in space-time, or warping space-time using two theoretical cosmic strings (thin streams of pure energy that move in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light). Of course, we don’t have the technology to make any of these a reality yet, but as astronomer Carl Sagan once said, anything we can imagine is possible.

As for perceptions, consider that light and sound travel at different speeds, so we see a person’s lips move before the sound reaches our ears, yet our brains sync the sight and sound to make them match. In times of extreme stress, like a car accident, time can seem to nearly stand still. Brain disorders such as epilepsy or a stroke can cause temporal tricks of the mind that make time seem to speed up or come to a complete stop. Some athletes claim they’ve trained their brains to create a time warp on demand, such as a baseball player who can mentally slow down the advance of a 100-mph fastball to be able to hit it.

So, knowing that what we think we know may not be actual fact, what would happen if we removed the word “impossible” from our vocabulary and stopped thinking of things in such absolute terms? For example, we know that we’ll never pass this test, so we create a limit on our potential. We know that a certain client will never spend more than a certain amount, so we put a mental cap on our sale. The worst part about these limitations is that they don’t come from an outside force. We do it to ourselves! So, forget what you think you know, and maybe the impossible can suddenly become possible.   

Mark Campbell owns Prestige Photography in Wheeling, West Virginia.