Happy New Year. May your Benz not rust, may your oil not appear milky, and may your climate control cool and warm as commanded.

Here's a link to NY Times I thought you might enjoy. The article is about scientific description of time, relatively speaking. I hope you enjoy his essay as much as I did.

Botnst

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/opinion/01GREE.html?pagewanted=1

The Time We Thought We Knew

By BRIAN GREENE

Published: January 1, 2004
It was an unlikely place to be at 4:30 a.m., since I'm not much on celebrations and take minimal notice of most every holiday. Yet, a few years back, on a rainy Dec. 31 morning, I stood in Times Square, together with a handful of other early revelers, awaiting images on a giant screen of festivities on Kiribati, the first inhabited place on earth to welcome the new year. I was, as I recognized through the fog of exhaustion and the hazy steam billowing from manhole covers, re-enacting a struggle I'd been engaged in for decades.

Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time's bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair of its passage.

But what is time? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it — but certainly, a few years into the 21st century, our understanding of time must be deeper than that. By now, you'd think, science must have figured out why time seems to flow, why it always goes in one direction and why we are uniformly drawn from one second to the next. The fact is, though, the explanations for these basic features of time remain controversial. And the more physicists have searched for definitive answers, the more our everyday conception of time appears illusory