Took the Dogs for a Walk

Took the dogs for a walk today.  We have three Chesapeake Bay Retrievers and if we don't exercise them every day they become a real hand full.  One of my favorite places to take the dogs is on the base at Quantico.  There is a back road that goes for a couple of miles back to the Breckenridge Reservoir dam.  The dam has a spectacular 5 or 6 story spillway that feeds three large ponds, each separated by a small damn.  These three ponds then empty into a creek that meanders back and forth across the road.  The road is lined by tall trees and is usually shaded at all times of the day except high noon.  The road is gated right now because they are laying a water main from the reservoir to some newly constructed buildings.

The stream is pretty special because it is stocked every year with trout.  The trout don't get very big, but it's such a beautiful little stream that I really enjoy working it.

So anyway, today I took the dogs down there for a walk.  Usually we take them swimming and have them retrieve plastic dummy's.  They absolutely love this and it's great exercise.  But today I figure I'll just walk up the road and let them explore.  It's a really nice morning, temps in the upper 70s and not too humid.  The peace and quiet and occasional light breeze are really refreshing.  The dogs work the road and stream, the male marking the territory all the way - where does all that urine come from!?  The females casting back and forth across the road.  At each point where the stream crosses the road the dogs splash merrily into the water looking for sticks to play with.  Occasionally I'll throw a rock into the deep water so they'll get to swim a little.

We go about a mile up the road and stop at one of the stream crossings where I can sit for a spell before we head back.  While we're sitting there a novel idea niggles it's way into my mind.  I'm look at the water as it flows across some flat rocks.  The water splits and spills over the rocks in many different directions and the thought that crosses my mind is, "What if time is like water."

Weird huh?  But what sparked the thought was one of Morgan Freeman's episodes of "Into the Wormhole."  This is one of the bennies of not working and your wife being away visiting family - you can watch this kind of stuff.  So anyway on this episode, entitled I think, 'Does Time Really Exist?', one of the ideas explored was whether or not time had two dimensions instead of the one we normally think of.

So now I'm watching water going every which way and thinking, "What if time has volume, just like water.  What if time is like a current of water that has eddy's and whirlpools and backwaters?  Now I'm not the guy that can do the math, but the idea is intriguing.  What if we are all like fish that live in the huge current of time and we aren't aware of other dimensions of time because we rarely get close to the edges of the current where the whirlpools and eddies are.  So time to us seems to be one dimensional - all going in one direction - past to present to future.

But many of us have experienced an intense event when time seems to slow down and we are aware of absolutely every detail.  Some people label time in these events as time dilation.  So there are places in the current where there are slow points.  And what about whirlpools.  Wouldn't that kind of be like dejavu when we feel like we've experienced some thing before?

And athletes talk about a particular state of mind when they are absolutely zeroed in on the technique of their sport as being "in the zone" or "in the flow" - interesting choice of words, no?

So what if time has volume just like water - wonder what that does to the math?  If time has volume them E=mc2  has more than one dimension and our universe must be much different than we think it is.  Or not.

Like I said, I'm not smart enough to crunch the numbers, but conceptually, the idea of time having volume is a neat idea.  Made for a very pleasant sit by the creek before trekking back to the car.