Quotes About Time

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history.

You can understand why it took nine hundred years to build—and that was with German workers. In Britain they would still be digging the foundations.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.

Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths11 of a second.

Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones?

To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.

three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

At depth, microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century18, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As The Economist has put it: 'The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much19.

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. British geologist Derek V.Ager

among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent").

Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning "old life"), Mesozoic ("middle life") and Cenozoic ("recent life"). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups

what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet.