Cracked.com 5 Basic Things You Won't Believe Science Can't Explain

#4. Time Is Relative and May Not Even Exist

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What You Were Taught

Things you did are in the past, things you're going to do are in the future, things you're doing right now are currently happening no matter how hard you wish you could return that stolen cop car, and, barring the misuse of a DeLorean, we're all moving along in one direction at the same speed.

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Old. We're all moving in the direction of old.

But Really ...

When physicists are doing their eggheady equations about the nature of reality, they don't factor time into it. Why? Because time doesn't matter to them. Equations work just the same if time goes forward, backward, or sideways. In fact, as far as physics is concerned, time is pretty much an illusion.

Of course, it's hard to say that time is an illusion if we all experience it the same, but here's the kicker: We don't. According to Einstein, we experience time at relative speeds. By infinitesimal amounts, someone who is sitting down is actually aging more slowly than someone who is running a marathon. It's not just a thought experiment with no real-world consequence -- GPS satellites have to account for time relativity to work properly, because time is literally moving more slowly on the satellite than it is on Earth. That means that scientists working on the International Space Station return to Earth younger than their colleagues on the ground, because time moves more quickly on Earth than it does in space. It's an almost immeasurably small amount, of course, but that doesn't stop them from being smug about it at your 40th birthday party, does it?

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You can at least remind them of how fat they were.

Then there's the fact that nobody really knows why time seems to move in only one direction to us, because as far as physics is concerned, the "arrow of time" is irrelevant to studying physical processes -- math doesn't need time (math got aaalll the time in the world for you, baby). In that sense, the fact that we can remember the past but not the future seems to be entirely arbitrary. Scientists have spent a lot of brainpower trying to figure out why that is, but they're only human, abstract concepts are pretty difficult, the new PlayStation looks awesome, and we haven't made much progress on this whole time thing. You don't need a scientist to understand how that formula works.

In school you learned all about a few basic concepts that prepared you for a lifetime of barely understanding the simplest things in this complicated world. It wasn't much, but it's all you have. And we're about to take that away from you. Don't think we're condescending. It turns out we don't understand a goddamn thing anymore either, and frankly, we are sick of it. Time to rage-quit this whole thinking business and get back to hitting things we don't understand with sticks. First up on the old stick-list is ...