Captured Thought: Time and Living in the Now

While generating widowed images I immediatly thought about space and time (continuum). My dad loves astronomy and photography, so we have numerous pictures of the moon and galaxies lying around our house.The concept of the light year has always baffled me. I find it really strange that we are seeing things that have happened in the past. I understand the idea that because we are so far away from the objects in space, light must travel to our eyes and that takes several light years to reach Earth. But, what happens if a star "burns out"? We won't realize that it has stopped producing light until after the fact. Can scientists predict when things like this will occur?

Moving away from the scientific questions, today in my voice lesson, my teacher and I recorded myself singing. During the proccess, I heard myself singing. I know this seems pretty normal, but it is very strange to feel the production of the sound and to hear it projected back at you all at the same time. It was startling to actually hear myself singing while I was singing. Most people don't get opportunities like this to live in the moment, literally.

I also thought that the collaboration for the TED project today reflects some of the same ideas. It's one thing to go online, do some of your own research, and then browse around to see what others have posted. It was a real learning experience to discuss what we wanted to see in the finished presentation and then actually see it show up on our webpage. It seemed magical (here's Lauren getting loopy). When people truly collaborate, things get done, quickly. I think this occurs because the people that are working together feel that they are letting the group down and holding back/preventing others from working if they themselves don't complete tasks. By having time to discuss and work on the TED project today, we could each monitor what was being put on the websites. If there was an issue, we didn't have to post a comment, wait for a response, and then make alterations. Today we got to tell people criticism face to face which forced people to work, which in turn relieved some stress from the people wanting the changes to be made. There is comfort in knowing that things are getting done, and because we could see the manipulations while they were occuring, we, as the owners of the presentation websites, felt relieved because we knew that the sites would have the correct improvements made. (I feel like that was really wordy... I can't fix it)

Time is a really difficult concept for me to understand because everything is related to time. It is happening around us, but we don't feel the direct effects of it until more time has passed. We are falling behind. Will we ever live in the now?

By the way, there is a really cool documentary about time, including our perception of time and its effects on us mentally as well as physically. I can't remember who the presenter of the video is, but the experiments he did and researched were really intriguing.