Natural Science Forum / Physics / New Theories / February 2004

Andy,

I'm a computer programmer, not a scientist, and I don't "know better," but I
have pondered the question of why time seems to speed up with age just as
you have.

I don't think the expansion of space or space-time explains why we
experience this apparent speedup. I'm not saying time doesn't speed up. What
I'm saying is that if time did speed up, we wouldn't notice it because our
clocks, both mechanical/electronic and biological, would have sped up too
and thus we could not experience the speed up. Time could speed up, slow
down, or wander all over the place, but since this is a physical property
and our bodies and minds are built on the physics of the universe, we can't
experience this objectively.

My own non-scientific theory of why times seems to speed up as we grow older
goes like this: As we age we accumulate more and more information (memory,
knowledge, etc.), and as we go thru our daily lives and access this
information, it takes longer to search our internal knowledgebase. At first
glance, it might seem that this would make time seem slower, but if we
consider that we are not wired to notice this increase in search time, time
seems to speed up.

This phenomenon may also explain why our hometown where we grew up seems
smaller now that it did when we lived there. Since the assessment of size or
distance requires access to our store of knowledge, the subjective speed up
in time translates into a subjective reduction in the size of material
objects.

Just my 2 cents,

// Jim