Be it a history lecture or Greek philosophy, we are told about time lines, which move relentlessly forward without pause. This seems to hold true in our daily lives; we certainly never wake up and find ourselves reliving yesterday. But while that is true when we measure time in small quantities, we find it is far from constant.

When scientists speak of a minute they are speaking in terms of average time. Time is not a constant march forward but rather small steps forward and backward. Each minute varies in length so when a scientist speaks of a minute he is referring to the average length of a minute.

Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity discovered that an object moving a long distance at a constant speed took different amounts of time to cover the same distance. Given that the object was traveling at the same speed the only explanation was that time was not constant; time therefore had to be variable. This led scientists to try to break time down into ever smaller pieces to measure the variations in time.

When quantum physicists, the examiners of infinitely small things, look at time they find that at an extremely small fractions of a second can vary by up to 1,800 percent, the average change being 200 percent. This means that a very small measure of time could be up to 18 times larger than another measurement of time.

With 10 billion of these small pieces of time in a second, even with large variations in their length, a second will average out to be very close to the same measurement. It is like flipping a coin. You might get three heads in a row but if you flip a coin 1,000 times it would be surprising to get many more than 500 heads or 50 percent. Just like the coin toss when you combine 10 billion time measurements together each second would be essentially the same.

For 300 years science had believed in the work of Sir Isaac Newton. He had worked out equations to explain motion; these used time as a constant. For those of us who took physics class we would have used plenty of his equations in class and homework. Unfortunately, when his equations were used over extremely long distances the variations of time in a given measurement caused these equations to fail. Scientists since the early 1800’s realized that the equations did not fully work but without the new tools to investigate they continued to use and teach these equations as these formulas were the best they had.

With the discovery that time is not constant such that a given length of time varies between different pieces of time, new questions began to emerge. For example, if time is not constant, does it have to be the same in every location? Time is different in various locations, and there are measures that can be taken to slow time down, speed it up, and other ways to manipulate time. I look forward to sharing how time moves at different speeds in different places and ways we can manipulate time in my next article.

Alexander Link is a junior at Tahoma High School and a self described math nerd. He is taking two AP math courses this year and this will be his third year participating in Bear Metal, Tahoma’s robotics club.