Time in a Bottle

12/31/06 – 1/6/06
by C. Zaitz

I’ve been thinking about time. I celebrated Christmas with my parents in Adams Basin, New York. Adams Basin is a little cross roads, but it has a tiny Post Office, a church, and a Little Red Schoolhouse. It is also recognized as the place where George Washington’s drummer boy was buried. In 1976 I was a little Brownie Girl Scout, marching in the Bicentennial parade, when America celebrated 200 years as a nation. We stopped at the little hill cemetery where the crooked slabs of marble poked out of the ground like broken teeth. People who had lived so long ago were buried there, their names long since erased by rain and wind. I grew up in an old house where the land was rich with buried bottles of different colors and shapes that would turn up every spring after roto-tilling. Every time we’d find a bottle, it was an exciting link to the past and the history of the little burg.

This past year I have learned a lot about time and different ways to think about it. Geology has taught me that time can be read like a mystery novel. Rock and dirt layers write the past in paragraphs of time, with overlapping plots and buried clues, like my bottles. Astronomy often depicts time as an arrow. The point of the arrow is in your brain, and the feathers are at the object whose light you are seeing. Locally, time’s arrow is straight and true, traveling only in one direction, from past to present to future. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an expression of how we all feel about time- it tends to flow, like heat or energy, from concentrated to spread out, like light leaving the sun.

However, we have found that gravity and speed can change time, as Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has stated. Traveling at nearly the speed of light can really slow down time for you. So can getting too close to the gravity of a black hole. If you were standing at a distance watching someone “fall in” to a black hole, they would appear to slow down and stop right at the edge, and you’d never actually see them fall in due to the stretching of time. Apparently time can be touched, time can be changed. Time is perceived.

My education courses reminded me that time must be used wisely, as teachers have a lot of work to do in a short period of time. Organization and planning must be the tools of an effective teacher, or an effective person. In this case, time is a commodity, and we are always trying to buy more. Sometimes we all need a mini black hole to slow down time for us.

On a personal note, this year has been one full of changes for me, from job loss to full time school and training, and now I will begin student teaching. I am grateful to those of you who have expressed support for the work I do in astronomy outreach, both by writing and by teaching in the planetarium. It is the one thing I hold on to through all the changes, and if I could keep the warm feelings I get from sharing astronomy in a bottle, I would, but since the only way to really “keep” moments of time is to share them, I will continue to do so as long as I can.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.