佚名/Anonymous
Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house. Each day at the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room, undressed and took up the same position in front of a motion picture camera. It photographed one frame of you per day, every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday, the reel of film was shown. You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour (27.4 minutes at sixteen frames per second). Images of this sort, though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar but useful perspectives of time. They may, for example, symbolize the telescoped, almost momentary character of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disaffected individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable brevity of our lives in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.
But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby’s conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.
設想你的整個一生都是在同一間房子裏度過的。每天的同一時間，你進入一個人工照明的房間，脫掉衣服，在攝影機前擺出同樣的姿勢。在你一生的每一天，攝影機都給你拍下一個鏡頭。在你72歲生日的那一天來放映這部影片。在不到半個小時的時間（每秒16個鏡頭，總共27.4分鍾）裏，你將看完72年來你的成長和衰老過程。這類圖像，雖然令人震驚，卻有助於說明關於時間的陌生而有用的觀點。比如說，它們可能象征著近乎瞬間的過去的縮影，就像某個焦慮而不滿的人眼裏所呈現的那樣。或者它們可能說明了在宇宙的時間段裏，我們的生命是極其短暫的。如果宇宙的估計年齡被縮短到72年，那麽人的生命大概隻有10秒鍾。