The present chapter analyses seemingly basic notions and phenomena such as time or light. This, however, won’t be as simple as it sounds. In my experience, the more complicated a system really is, the simpler it looks. If that statement is true, then so is its opposite: There is a simple system behind every complex-looking thing. Let’s take a blade of grass. How simple it seems! But if you think twice and consider what you know about it, you’ll be amazed.

A blade of grass can turn inorganic matter into organic matter.

We, who consider ourselves to be superior beings to a blade of grass, are not so good at that.

We know that full quantum mechanical processes take place in a blade of grass. We even named it—photosynthesis—yet we have only just begun to understand it.

If I want to address the idea of complexity by comparing a Boeing 747 to a blade of grass, then the blade of grass is a supercomputer, and the airplane is a dowel. Take the structure of the Rotating Tower in Dubai. It looks quite complicated—it truly is remarkable. But a closer look will prove that the materials that were used in its construction are anything but complicated: concrete, glass, iron, and steel. They were put together according to a clear and comprehensive plan. The Rotating Tower, therefore, is not complicated, because we can see what it is made of and how the materials are connected to each other.

But what should we consider complex? What should we consider simple? Fair question. These words are indeed arbitrary.[1]

Still, let’s try and define complexity.

We may say that something is not complex if we understand its structure, origin, and mechanisms. Let’s take a look at the objects we are surrounded by. They are made by men, usually after precise planning, knowing exactly what to expect from a particular material in the end product. Therefore the makers of artifacts are aware of all circumstances of the creation of these artifacts, and they have all the necessary plans, so it is safe to say that we people are not able to create complicated structures. Complexity depends on the person looking at it: Does he find it easy or difficult to understand?

We don’t know how natural creation works though. We have no knowledge about the methods and mechanisms that are being used, and we only speculate about the materials too. That means that whatever nature creates is complex by definition.

It’s time to put fixed ideas, stereotypes, and preconceptions out of the way. As you go on reading, you’ll find that this isn’t an easy task. We’ve been letting our brains be programmed since birth, and everything that now fills our brains seem so obvious that we forget to question the reasons and goals of things happening around us.

Let’s try a quick and simple experiment, and we’ll see how effective the programming has been.

Think about three relevant events in your life. Choose one that happened ten years ago, another that happened five years ago, and a third, recent one from these past weeks or days. Create three separate mental pictures.

Ready?

Now put them next to each other: first the event from ten years ago, then the one from five years ago, and then the most recent one. It all looks nice together, right? But let’s now switch on our defense system by changing the sequence of the pictures. See if your brain lets you put the most recent memory first, replacing the oldest one? Then the second picture stays the same, and the third picture will be from the oldest event.

As I said, this is a simple experiment. But don’t feel discouraged if the reorganizing does not happen quickly or doesn’t seem to work out on the first try. Maybe you get there after three to five attempts. This is how many it takes to trick the unit that is responsible for keeping the flow of time intact. And if you were able to do it on your first attempt, now try putting four or five mental pictures in reverse order.

This simple test points out how our minds accept doctrines to an extent that it fights back when we happen to disagree: What are you thinking? Time can only head in one direction!

Well, this is exactly the way of thinking that we have to forego to become more open-minded. The good news is that the brain is open to training. As we go on reading, it will be easier and easier to visualize ideas that hardly ever cross our minds in the daily hustle and bustle of work, shopping, and doing household chores.

The first part of the book is about those so-called facts and phenomena that we simply take for granted and don’t bother questioning. According to our brain, these are basic concepts: The answer is so simple, accept the facts.

So The Book that Happened begins with these concepts. We lay down the foundation on which we start building. We look at seemingly simple things, only to discover how unthinkably complex they truly are. I urge you to be on the lookout for contradictions. Don’t be contented with my explanations; don’t take everything at face value. Question me! Judge everything with a stern eye, and use logical thinking; try and find fault in whatever I say. The more questions you have, the more you get to understand, and the more answers your brain will supply.

You may first ask: why logic? Plato said that once science contradicts itself, a new theory has to be developed, one that would solve the contradiction. He also considered that the starting point of the new must be the old. But what did he mean?

It’s not easy to question Plato’s words. They can be true and false at the same time. Just as a knife can be used for a good deed—slicing bread—and evil—murder. If we use Plato’s theory to confirm a result within our own system by all means—because it generates adequate results and enables our model to function—it may prove destructive. When we want to show that we are right, we should never use theories that confirm our statement. Instead we should look for theorems that seem to contradict us and see what’s behind them. We might find that they are not true—or that we were wrong.

The ancient Greek physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c. 300 BC) had to suffer the destructive power of false theories. He was the first to state that the sun and the stars are fixed and that it is the earth that revolves around the sun. Religion, however, followed Plato’s theory, considering that the starting point of the new must be the old. Since they didn’t find any contradiction between the geocentric worldview and the holy texts, they did not see any reason to change their beliefs where the sun and the earth were concerned. Aristarchus of Samos, however, considered the theories of the holy texts incompatible with his own. He became the first scholar to devise the model of heliocentrism. Aristarchus was accused of heresy by Cleanthes, and ultimately had to flee.

For two thousand years, Plato’s theory was a matter of life or death. Heliocentrism played a part in the death of Hypathia, the Alexandrine scholar. Then in 1600, we also punished Giordano Bruno for his heliocentric view: We burned him alive. Today’s astronomy would not be the same without the contribution of Galileo Galilei, yet we dragged him through the mud too. He narrowly escaped execution by burning at the stake, and he had to endure long years of imprisonment, followed by house arrest, and he was prohibited to write. Galileo Galilei reconciled the contradiction in his own system, but it nearly cost him his life.

As we see, the clergy at the time evidently justified themselves through their own texts and theories. If they happened to find contradictory information, they resolved it with a simple stroke of pen. By such corrections they fulfilled Plato’s requirements, having created their own science.

The great truths of the past can only be considered true if they are interpreted correctly. If we keep on building on a false foundation, we won’t reach truth in the end. Especially if we do it in cycles, we’ll certainly reach lies. Therefore, we must go back to the start, demolish the foundation, and lay down a new and stable one. It will be a tough job! We might not like the results of some logical deductions and mental experiments. Others will seem more likable. But results don’t care about being liked or disliked. They won’t be happier if they’re readily accepted, and they won’t feel awkward if they’re rejected because they were too hard to understand.

Mental experiments are crucial in this book. They build upon logic and yield results. Most experiments aim to tackle a proven concept, and they do so through simulation. Simulation will often differ from the real way that leads to the result, but since we already know what result to expect, we will declare the simulation true. In such mental experiments we can exclude unnecessary factors that would only complicate the process. We will also have the possibility to include hypothetical elements that will lead us to desire the result, therefore proving the hypothesis correct.

The following chapters focus on factors that play a part in coincidence. We need to understand them first in order to get to further, abstract definitions that cannot be explained rationally.

 

 

1.1 Time

 

Have you ever wondered about the concept of time as we know it today?

I suppose there were situations when more people had to do something—go hunting or perform a ritual sacrifice, for example—long before the introduction of accurate time tracking. They must have had mutual agreements to time these events, maybe the position of the sun. One thing is sure: At some point someone discovered that if they stuck a piece of wood in the ground, its shadow would reflect the movement of the sun. And the exact same thing would happen the next day, too. Maybe he realized that by placing rocks on the route of the stick’s shadow when he went hunting or when the ritual sacrifice was held, he could be sure that when the shadow of the stick reached that particular rock the next day, it would either be time to go hunting or time to attend the sacrifice.

This must have become overwhelming for our inventor after a while, since he must have kept adding rocks around the shadow of the stick. Each of them was linked to a particular event, but they appeared in a random order. The fact that hunting or ritual sacrifice were not an everyday event made matters even worse. The shadow touched each rock day after day, no matter which of the events were supposed to happen every day.

Despite the random placement of the rocks, our inventor must have been able to see that the rocks formed a certain shape around the stick—an oval. It might have been this discovery that led to the invention of the sundial.

 

So we can make a statement regarding how we started measuring time—our ancestor measured events instead. A chain of events, made up of millions and billions of movements. As the shadow moved, he placed event timers connected to particular happenings. To put it plainly: He counted and measured movement.

Our inventor could have been sure that when the shadow of the stick reached one of the rocks, it meant that something was about to happen. For example, it was time for the sacrifice ritual. But what if the earth started spinning faster for some reason? Say, for the following three days, it revolved 30 percent faster? (Let’s omit natural and ecological disasters, but suppose that speeding could happen without serious consequences.) What would our inventor have noticed?

Well, nothing at all. The shadow of the stick would still have reached the rocks the same way as before. In the evenings, our inventor might have felt exhausted since the day was shorter and he still had to perform the same amount of tasks. He had a shorter timeframe for all that—because of faster the rotation of the earth.

From a scientific perspective, it is evident that our inventor picked a wrong reference, because if the speed of the earth’s rotation changed, he would not know that his timing was incorrect: He wouldn’t be able to perform his tasks at the exact time he planned. If the very foundation is unreliable, there can be changes that are impossible to detect—the shadow of the stick would still move from rock to rock.

Here’s another question worth pondering. Let’s disregard the moon phases and the orbit of the earth around the sun for a second and imagine that our planet doubles its speed as of tomorrow without any serious consequences. How would it change the average life expectancy, which today is around seventy-five years? Starting from tomorrow, would it be seventy-five or thirty-seven years? (We will come back to the issue of years, months, and weeks later, for no other reason than to point out how shaky is the ground on which we have built our knowledge.)

Thanks to the development of technology, the hourglass was invented. Like the sundial, it had its flaws. If the sand was too dry or too moist, its speed changed accordingly. People were right to ask, Why does time slow down when the air is damp? The sand did flow at a slower pace. The hourglass therefore measures movement, not time. Again. Certain external factors can change the frequency of cycles. Therefore, the hourglass depends on the environment, and therefore, we identified yet another unreliable instrument for measuring time.

In the past, we have used all kinds of mechanical instruments to measure time. The most recent one is the atomic clock. To put it simply, the clock uses “the electromagnetic spectrum of atoms as a frequency standard for its timekeeping element.”[2] The frequency is presented as seconds (and larger units of time) on the display unit of the clock. The operators of these clocks do everything in their power to keep the electromagnetic spectrum unchanged and undisturbed by the various external conditions, I am sure. Nevertheless, the frequency depends on the environment: temperature and the electromagnetic field. There are solutions to these problems, to keep the frequency unchanged. Up to now, it seems that atomic clocks work accurately, and the atomic frequency shows the same values in any given environment—but maybe it just seems so. Do think about it. In prehistoric times, the sun came up each morning and it set each evening, for days on end. Imagine the surprise and confusion when there was a solar eclipse! They happen only every seventy to eighty years. We, with our atomic clock, also suppose that the variables in nature are constant. To define these variables, we use measurements that are based on other unstable units of measurement.

The way we measure length and weight is a perfect example of that. Both units of measurement are based on mutual agreement and depend on external factors. Take for example a 1-meter-long piece of steel. The statement that it’s 1 meter long is true only when the temperature is 20 Celsius (i.e. 68 Fahrenheit). As soon as the temperature rises, for example to 104 Fahrenheit (40 Celsius), the length of that same piece of steel will not be 1 meter anymore.

 

The situation is the same with weight: It depends on where we measure. If you measure 1 kilogram on the seaside, and then take it to 3000 ft above sea level, it won’t be 1 kilogram anymore. And if you take it to the moon, you get yet another completely different result.

And it’s the same with similar units, for example foot or pound: They are based on agreements and variables.

Therefore it is safe to say that atomic clocks are only as accurate as the variables of the environment are constant.

One more thing about the atomic clock: What if there is a global mistake in the calculations that control the environmental variables? It could hide the problem itself, the same way as our inventor wouldn’t know the Earth revolves faster just by looking at his sundial. Would we notice anything? I think not. So what we can state about the atomic clock is that its foundation is based on a variable, which variable was defined by calculations and measurements that themselves depend on other factors.

Humans aim to know and prove what the length of one day is, i.e. the time needed for the earth to turn around once. The introduction of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)[3] looked promising. To compensate for the slowing pace of the earth’s rotation, UTC adjusts the length of a year by adding roughly one second to it, based on the measurements of the atomic clock. This is the only way to get the real length of a day, which is considered to be 86,400 seconds.

If we project these leap seconds of UTC to the world population of eight billion people, we suddenly get a bit more than 253 years out of nowhere. And this is only the smaller part of the problem. Much more disturbing is that there is no instrument or logic to measure time which doesn’t depend on the environment, which isn’t relative. Just think about UTC. It is built on two inaccurate measurements—the rotation of the earth and the calculations of the atomic clock. We now believe that the atomic clock is more accurate than all other means we’ve tried before, therefore we’ve made it the standard, and we’re adjusting the time we calculated based on the earth’s rotation with the atomic clock’s measurements.

All of the above might lead us to the conclusion that time is what we experience between two events or movements. Keep this in mind, because we will see that time flies differently for an atom or a human being, as soon as it is taken out of its natural environment, the frame of reference is omitted and the environmental variables are changed.

The earth does not only revolve around its axis, but it orbits the sun as well. Back in the time of the sundial, our inventor must have noticed that with the passing of many, many days, the shape drawn by the stick’s shadow changed a bit. He must have discovered that some events happened periodically, following a cycle: snowfall, for example, or blazing sunlight. He must have observed that there was a main cycle every 365 days. He called it a year. But this created another problem: He had to divide the year into shorter sections to be able to place the periodical events. But how could 365 days be divided into equal periods?

There must have been a huge discussion about what’s to be done. Saying, “See you in 143 days” or, “Come over in 287 days” to a friend is quite impossible, isn’t it? Perhaps our ancestors were influenced by the planets. Perhaps some group pointed at a number they liked best. We will never know, but one way or another, they came up with the number 12. (I have given it so much thought. Why not ten?) This number maybe reflected the phases of the Moon, or the geometric circle, which is 360 degrees, and therefore can be divided by 12. But this number doesn’t solve the problem. Maybe it was used because ancient Egyptians defined a 360-day structure for a year—based on how many days passed between two floods of the Nile (it was between 360-370 days back then).

This is logical: 360 days can actually be divided equally into 30 days per month. But the introduction of the Julian and Gregorian calendar changed everything. The previous year of 360–370 days was suddenly replaced by another truth based on a new observation. It still used the 12-month structure, but raised the days of the year to 365 plus a little. And there were two problems with it. First, 365 cannot be divided by 12 without a remainder. Second, there’s no such thing as that “little,” i.e., a fraction of a day. A way had to be found to squeeze those unstable days into an unstable year in a way that creates a reasonable system of months and days. Maybe they flipped a coin or something. But in the end they chipped away some days from one month, and added some to another, without any apparent reason. And this is how our months came to exist.

The number of days in a month raises other problems of the system. For example, in Hungary people receive monthly paychecks, that is, the same amount of money each month. Here’s a rhetorical question: Why is Hungarian labor worth more in February, which has twenty-eight days, than in March, which has thirty-one days? Which paycheck is real? The monthly or the daily? And there’s another issue concerning finances: If we look at our bank statement of the previous leap year, is the yearly interest calculated upon 365 or 366 days?

But back to the creation of the calendar. The problem of weeks needed solving, because a month was still too broad when it came to dating an event. A new element was devised: calendar weeks. The length of the week can be tied to the division of lunar months into two or four periods. It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point, but this doesn’t lead to exact numbers either, because four times seven is twenty-eight. Just a minor detail, nothing to worry about. By this point we’re quite used to it, right?

However there were some merchant communities where one week was made up of only five days, and there were others who used eight. Some say that in the beginning weeks weren’t even intended to be connected to months. And yet the calendar week became almost inherent to our mundane existence; we build on it even though we find no reasonable, scientific, or logical explanation as to how and why it exists in this form.

Anyway, it is obvious that making weeks compatible with months wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, so the mission was abandoned altogether. It would have meant January ending on a Thursday, immediately followed by a Monday, being the first of February. (Or a Sunday, which is considered the first day of the week in several cultures.) This solution would’ve been hard to systemise, so the days of the week stayed continuous.

We see the fearlessness in the definition of weeks and months and years. The fact that the entire system was haphazard didn’t seem to bother the decision makers, and neither did the lack of unity or accuracy. They seemed to have one goal alone: to give the people weeks and months and years. This sounds as if I sold a finished, yet defective software to a client, where for example logging into the program was only possible on every fourth attempt. If the client complained, I would wisely answer, “I did this for your own good, you see. The program is actually a lot safer, because nobody will have the patience to hack into it. So this isn’t a bug, it’s actually an advantage!” And in a way, I would be right, because truth is a matter of perspective. It all depends on which truth we pick: mine or my client’s?

We can conclude that the calendar week lacks all sorts of design and accuracy. It was pressed upon us; we are forced to live by it, working for five days and resting for two.

Time wouldn’t be complete without days, weeks, months, and years. We defined 86,400 seconds as one day, knowing it depends on the environment and various reference points, and further divided it into milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and so on.[4] The fact that we used the decimal system (where the units are powers of 10) for time units shorter than one second, is quite intriguing, because this too is arbitrary. Anything less than a second is actually so small that calculations that involve switching between the decimal and the sexagesimal system become extremely complicated and time-consuming. On the one hand, we would have to work with an infinite number of decimals, and on the other hand, the calculations would mostly be about conversion from one system into the other. It’s quite strange that we hardly ever care about the exact number of seconds per day, but once we get to microlevel it matters when exactly an event happens within the second.

The evolution of time is remarkable. Units of time were continuously built on errors. We believed that the movement of the sun, the moon, and the earth is constant, and we used this as a point of reference for every calculation and theory of time. There have been attempts to repair the inherent mistakes, such as the introduction of leap years, leap seconds, and UTC itself. But I firmly believe that a house can only be well-built if the foundation is strong enough. And when it comes to time, we can hardly even talk about a foundation because of the millions of environmental variables.

We can analyze time logically instead of in a physical way. We are still bound to stumble upon contradictions that don’t have rational explanation—and yet, time exists nevertheless.

Let’s ponder the question of what is time. What do we mean when we talk about time in general? Does the past, present, and future actually exist, and if so, how can we logically prove it?

There’s a paradox I like very much. I might have come up with it myself, but it’s also possible that I’ve heard it somewhere. It goes like this: If you do something today, how will you prove tomorrow that you did it yesterday? The reason why we cannot answer correctly is because we need to involve the concept of past in the answer. But if we mention the word “past”, we have to explain it, too, and we cannot do so without repeating it.

It is generally thought that the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. So here’s another question: How did we get to this number? There was only one way: by relying on the structure of time that is being used today. And this system is based on comparisons.

 

However, we don’t know what a day actually looked like four billion years ago. How may units made up the thing that we call one day, today? What today is approximately 86,400 seconds and a little, may have been only 40,000 seconds back then. The frame of reference for time measurement—the sun and the earth—probably didn’t even exist at that point. We can only state that the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago according to how we measure time today, but in reality, it could’ve been 1 billion year or 8 billion years.

Carbon dating is just as relative. We suppose that the decomposition of isotopes happened in the exact same way, with the exact same speed 40,000 years ago as it does today. With carbon dating, we can go back 50–60 thousand years in time, although the results are unreliable. The accuracy limit is considered to be around 37,000 years. I could say the very same about carbon dating and calculating the age of the earth: They are true only if everything that happens today, happened the same way yesterday, the day before, and 30,000 years ago, and even two billion years ago. So it would be true if we lived in a static world that never changed—but our environment changes at an unthinkable speed. As we examined the calculation of the earth’s age, it became clear that we were dealing with something intangible and impossible to uphold. That’s nasty. But unfortunately, time is a key factor of speed, so the miscalculations of time have a direct effect on speed—if one is flawed, so is the other. If we say that a day was made up of 86,400 seconds four billion years ago, then that would mean that the rotation speed at the Equator had to be 1,040.421 miles per hour. However, we know that this wasn’t the case. The rotation speed was higher; therefore, a day could not have been made up of 86,400 seconds for sure. And so, there’s no point in taking 86,400-second calendar days into consideration when we want to talk about time in the past, and we can’t talk about speed either. Whatever we say wouldn’t be true because it would be calculated upon non-true time.

We can look at time from the perspective of biology. Who would know more about the passing of time than humankind? Aren’t we the ones who are subjected to it, who live in it, experience it?

Let’s see how time works when we are not awake. Have you ever experienced the presence of time in your dreams? Have you ever seen a clock tower or a wristwatch or any sort of clock? Have you ever dreamed that you had to finish something in time, or you were expecting something to happen at a given moment? Highly unlikely. Time hardly ever appears in our dreams; it is not connected to our actions. In our dreams, time usually stands still, and events just happen. We can’t say that we experience time while we are dreaming, except, perhaps, if we refer back to how time and speed are linked together. In that case, there is some sort of experience of time since we do encounter speed in our dreams. Just think about those times you dreamed that you were falling into the abyss.

If time really was as natural as we suppose, shouldn’t it be somehow displayed at a genetic level too? If we wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, we’re hardly able to tell what time of day it is, let alone the exact hour. Have you ever woken up after a 5–10-minute nap, feeling as if you slept for at least an hour? Or the other way round: an hour-long nap felt like a couple of minutes only? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. It seems that our brain isn’t wired to know time; for some reason, it doesn’t need it constantly.

So when does time—which otherwise seems so essential—become unnecessary? Let’s take a look at how our brain works, and we’ll find out. Our neural activity is based on electromechanics. And where there’s electricity, there are electromagnetic waves too. Our brain produces such waves, that we categorize into four main states, based on our present knowledge and measuring technology. (Waves and frequency will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 1.3 Light.) In two of these categories we are able to discern time, while in the other two time is absent. It’s important to note that the frequencies below are not the reason we experience time; they are physiological phases. Whether we perceive time during these frequencies is their consequence.

• Beta state—13 to 40 HZ (13 to 40 cycles/second) covers most of the period when we are wide awake. This is the state when we work, socialize, run to catch the bus, etc. This is the state that we call life, what we experience the most. In beta state we are highly aware of time; some people are able to track it with minute precision without checking a clock.
• Alpha state—emission of 8 to 13 HZ electromagnetic waves. It is a state when we are relaxed and at ease, yet our brain stays active. When we are resting or relaxing, we reach an alpha state; it is essential for daydreaming or artistic creativity. Intuition arrives in this state. However, the alpha state is not connected to physical activity or the lack thereof. We might also reach this state during a walk in nature, when we notice the beautiful landscape, or during yoga exercises (even though some of those require quite the physical effort). In this state, we can lose sense of time; we’ll feel it was shorter than the actual measured period—this is when we feel that time just flew. The longer we stay in this state, avoiding the beta state, the less accurate we get in guessing time.
• Theta state—emission of 4 to 8 HZ electromagnetic waves. The higher frequencies of theta state make us slow and languid; the lower frequencies evoke images and fantasies. We often feel we control these events, but usually our consciousness flows with these flashing ideas. In the lower frequencies, we use our sense of time. By learning how to mix theta and alpha states, we are able to reach deep meditation, where we perceive an hour as five or six minutes. This explains why yogis and experienced practitioners of meditation can sit still for eight to ten hours. They feel as if only one hour has passed, or maybe even less, because they are able to arrange theta and alpha cycles consciously. If we are able to guess what time it is when our sleep gets interrupted, it means that we were in theta state only for a short while. During sleep this state brings dreams; in theta state, there are no paradoxes; everything seems obvious. Reaching a theta state while being awake enables us to recall long-forgotten memories and to creativity without limitations. Extraordinary ideas are born on the threshold between alpha and theta state.
• Delta state—our brain activity is between 1.5 and 4 HZ. Delta is the state of the unconscious, where time ceases to exist altogether. After waking in this state, we wouldn’t remember that we woke up, we go back to sleep and reach delta state again at once. This state enables bodily functions that are inactive during the day, such as self-healing. For most people, it is impossible to reach delta state while awake, as if there was a veil between beta and delta state that is impossible to see through from either side. In delta state, time loses its meaning; reaching this state while awake is the deep trance. Some of the few who managed to experience the timelessness of delta state were Buddhist monks, creating a delta state by their so-called self-mummification. The mummification process takes three thousand-day long phases, the last one being spent in delta state. What in “reality” was several hundred days, felt for them only a few days.

Let’s take another example that proves that time is relative: the concept of dog years. It’s a curious little invention, to enable comparison between the age of dogs and humans. One dog year is said to be the equivalent of approximately seven human years. (There is some disagreement on the exact ratio, but seven is somewhere in the middle.) The comparison is a good idea as it gives us the opportunity to investigate a different time experience. Assuming that a dog experiences its life as long as we, humans, consider ours, it raises a few questions.

To enable a dog to experience seven years’ worth of time in one year, it seems logical that it would have to experience seven times as many events. This is because both physics and biology measure time by using the cyclicality of events. We know that dogs spend half of their lifetime asleep, while for humans, it’s only one-third. This is important because we don’t perceive events and therefore time when we are asleep. The chart below shows how many events a dog should experience in order to match the experience of a human (i.e. events and movements).

…

[1] The mathematician László Lovász stated, “There is no algorithm to calculate the complexity of a particular sequence.”

[2] Wikipedia article about the atomic clock.

[3] Wikipedia article about UTC.

[4] Fun fact: 86,400 divided by 360 (a geometrical circle is 360 degrees) is 240, which is the sexagesimal numeric system itself.

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