Do You Feel That Time is Speeding Up?

Whenever I talk to people these days, they all mention the same thing - time seems to be speeding up. I have heard things like:

"Sometimes it feels that you have just started a week and before you realise it, it is Friday again."

"Has Michael Jackson/Farah Fawcett been dead for a year already?"

"I was last in New York two ummm three ummm can it be six years ago already?!"

I remember when I was a kid and summers seemed to be so long, the school year took forever to be over and waiting for my birthday to roll around to ages. These days it feels like summer lasted only a few weeks, the year seems to fly by and am I really as old as that now?

So what is going on? Is time really speeding up, or is it just my perception of time that has changed?

One long held scientific explanation is known as 'telescoping'. This is the idea that time feels faster when we look back on past events and discover that we underestimated how long ago they occurred.

When you're 8, a year is 1/8 of your life experience. A big chunk. Seems like forever between birthdays.

When you're 20, a year is 1/20 of your life experience. A smaller chunk. Seems like a few months between birthdays.

When you're 60, a year is 1/60 of your life experience. A tiny chunk. Seems like a week between birthdays.

Two researchers, William Friedman and Steve Janssen, conducted a study in New Zealand on this issue. They found that there are very few differences between age groups of the perception of time passing.

This study was corroborated by a German study in 2005 which was conducted with a much larger sample of people. Age accounted for four per cent of the variance in how quickly participants said the last ten years had passed and just one per cent of the perception of time's speed in general.

Another theory is that time isn't speeding up, but rather it's our awareness of everything that's increasing, which gives the illusion that time is speeding up. There is much more to cram into our minds than their was 5-10 years ago.

Time can appear (or the illusion of time) to slow down in a relaxed state of mind, also. Relaxed sleep or meditation can appear to last for hours, but can in fact be merely minutes.

One of the greatest thinkers of our time, Albert Einstein agreed that time was flexible and formed the basis for his theory or relativity. He said that the closer we come to light speed, the more time would appear to slow down for us from the perspective of someone who, in relation to us, was not moving. He called the slowing of time due to motion time dilation.

It is a known fact that our universe is speeding up, as a result from the Big Bang. As our speed increases compared to the rest of the universe, is this having an effect on our own perception of time?

Dmitro Stary and Irina Soldatenko, two Russian physicists from Kiev's Institute of Quantum Physics have developed a dynamic new way to measure the expansion of the universe, and with it, discovered that time appears to be speeding up as well.

The pair spent 30 years developing new instruments, computer programs and doing research into this phenomenon.

A Russian newspaper which reported on this said:

"The major outcome... which was never intended by the scientists, became obvious only during the final stages of the experiment. After conducting thorough analysis of acquired data, they discovered that not only does the Universe expand, but time tends to accelerate as well."

This concept is so new that is unlikely to be peer corroborated and reviewed for at least another 30 years.

Another theory goes like this: For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second, The military have used this as a very reliable reference. However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising. It is now over 12 cycles per second.

This means that there is the equivalent of less than 16 hours per day instead of the old 24 hours. Our clocks still move in seconds, minutes and hours and still click over a full day in 24 hours but due to the earths increased heartbeat, we perceive it to be only two thirds as long or a perception period of merely 16 hours.

Can this frequency jump in the Earth's vibrations be partially responsible for the speeding of time?

One other explanation compared time to the ever tightening spiral of a seashell. As you travel from the outermost edge towards the center, each trip around the center takes less and less distance. So, a day or a year would go faster and faster. Eventually, we will reach a point in the center at which we make a quantum jump through some sort of portal or gate into a changed reality.

Science has seem to proven that time is indeed changing, but it seems to be at a loss as to the why and how much. One thing I am sure of is that to me time seems to be accelerating at an alarming rate.

Do you feel it too?

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James is an author and explorer with a deep interest in all things paranormal. When not travelling the world in search of the strange, weird and bizarre, he writes about his experiences and the research he has done.

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