Who hasn't heard an older person remark about how weeks and months and years, especially
years, seem to fly bye ever so much faster with the passage of time? My friend Richard asked me the
other day "Am I just imagining this", shrugging his shoulders, "is that some kind of illusion?" he
wondered.

"In fact" I said to him "that's something I've thought about before and have come to the
conclusion that the illusion does in reality have a very definite mathematical basis". This is how I
explained it to Richard.

In our perceiving time, we employ many different standards of measure: days, weeks, months,
years, etc., all of which are standards of convenience deriving ultimately from rough
approximations of certain celestial timepieces. They set our rhythms, and for practical purposes
are regular and unchanging.

But from a human being's point of view there is an ultimate standard of measure, which in
fact is finite. This is one's lifetime, that any given "now" right up until the end.

So when we speak of our perception of time we are being very specific. It is from each
individual's point of view: that of a single observer in a real time frame that begins at zero. A baby
enters this world and is at some point a day old. Its' entire lifespan also equals that one day. That
next day must seem like a lifetime from the baby's sense-of-time viewpoint, and in fact,
mathematically, that second day is equal in duration to what was the lifetime length after the end
of the first day.

When we were children time really did move along much more slowly. It wasn't an illusion
that as we came into our late teens, summer between high school and college seemed to zip right bye
compared to those of elementary school. It was the mathematical structure of "lifetime", not an
imagination gone awry.

Here's how it works. Take our tenth year, for example, that time between the ninth and tenth
birthdays. It represents 0.1 of the lifetime, which is really the human observer's unit for sensing and
gauging the passage of time. When a one year old becomes two, that second year mathematically
represented 0.5, or fully one-half of the lifetime. Compare my fiftieth year at 0.02 of my lifetime
standard; and if I make it to eighty, that last year's experience will represent a mere 0.0125 of the
standard of measure.

Each successive year represents a smaller portion of the whole. And we sense this, and talk
about it amongst ourselves. It is real, even to the extent that it lends itself to mathematical modeling.

Copyright P. Kasprzycki 1997