With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those fine words from Emerson are pretty typical of literally dozens of quotations extolling the virtues and benefits of living in the present. Unfortunately for old Waldo, it is physically impossible to experience now.
When we look at the clear night sky, we “see” stars that may not exist, that may have burned out or gone supernova eons before the earth became a habitable planet. That is an obvious example of our inability to experience now, but the present is much more elusive than that.
The smallest scientifically accepted measurement of time is the Planck unit. It’s the amount of time it takes for light to travel one Planck length in a vacuum – roughly 10 to the minus 43 seconds. As of 2010, the smallest amount of time ever actually measured was 12 attoseconds – 12 quintillionths of a second, or 1024 Planck units.
It takes about a gazillion of those Planck units for my words to make it from this computer screen to your eyes. Once it’s there, it takes even more time to convert the light hitting your retina into electrochemical impulses that must then travel your optic nerve to multiple locations within your brain where they must be recognized, analyzed, organized and then somehow reconstituted into cogent thought. The ball is in the catcher’s mitt long before even the brightest Evelyn Wood scholar can get the bat off his shoulder.
Even if you stub your toe or bite your tongue, by the time your brain experiences pain, the actual contact that created it is long gone.
In terms of what we can comprehend or even what we can simply experience, there simply is no such thing as now. If now exists at all, it has become then long before we are aware of it.
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