Talk about End Time. The Koch Brothers are buying Time Magazine. I would hope every self-respecting subscriber will cancel their subscription. Henry Luce was no prize  but he was a flaming liberal compared to the Charles and David Koch-suckers. [Luce also owned Life, but it died, lol].

Neither Luce, nor Turner, nor Warner, nor the Kochs own Time. We own time. But, something I’ve been puzzling at for some time now: What is time?

I’ve been obsessed with death lately. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. It’s not a bad thing: I want to fucking understand it, okay? Is that asking too much?

I don’t think that most non-scientists have fully grokked the concept of relativity. I confess that I have a dilettante’s understanding of quantum mechanics,  little more than an intuition from my years of experimenting with psychedelics. (I fell in love and took LSD both for the first time in one week, some years ago. Been trying to live that week down ever since).

One metaphor is the desert sky at night. You gaze up reverently at an infinitude of stars – but the light you are seeing is thousands and millions and billions of years old, every sparkle a different Malthusian age. In other words, none of those twinkles are currently anywhere near where you are seeing them.

The relativity of time means time is malleable, like playdough. You can stretch it, compact it. Mold it into all kinds of shapes.

Back in the psychedelic days, we used to consult the I Ching all the time, (full disclosure: I still do it sometimes) always surprised at how accurate were it’s rather vague prophecies. We grasped onto Jung’s explanation for this phenomenon: synchronicity, a concept that holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

I recently learned that Jung developed this concept in conversations with Einstein in 1908 and 1912, though he didn’t write about it until the 1940’s.

The quantum physics equivalent of synchronicity is quantum entanglement, whereby subatomic particles can influence other particles over huge distances, simultaneously, thereby defying the speed-of-light limit. Shrodinger’s cat, dead or alive, is somewhere in there.

I don’t pretend to understand it all. But I’m beginning to think we can understand a lot more than we think we can. A theory of everything? Bring it on.