Is Time Speeding Up?

By James Donahue

Older folks are quite aware of the way time seems to pass at a faster pace as we age. When we were children, it seemed that a day of play was a very long time. A year was eternity, and we had a tendency to wish the clocks to run faster when waiting for special events like birthdays or a vacation trip.

After hitting the big 40, it seems as if the clock begins spinning so fast we want to put the brakes on it. But to no avail. Thinning hair, root canals, middle-age bulge, aching joints, hemorrhoids and fast growing nose hairs all become part of our daily lives. You don't see the older generation celebrating birthdays like children do.

If we can pause from the pace of our daily lives to take note, world events also seem to be developing at a faster pace. It is almost as if everybody is in a race toward something . . . 

There is comfort, perhaps, in knowing that two scientists at Kiev's Institute of Quantum Physics have developed a dynamic new way to measure the expansion of the universe, and with it, discovered that time appears to be speeding up as well.

These two Russian physicists, Dmitro Stary and Irina Soldatenko, by-passed the standard methods of measuring the Universe and went right back into the lab. They theorized that if the Universe does expand, the process will not only effect the outer edges, but the entire Universe.

The two spent 30 years and developed a unique computer program that helped them determine the expansion of instruments right in front of them.

All of this undoubtedly involves quantum physics and a lot of long boring numeric formulas that would take books to explain here. Not that I have the time to spend a lifetime trying to understand it. The point is, the technique developed by Stary and Soldatenko appears to really work.

A story about this discovery in Pravda noted: "The major outcome . . . which was never intended by the scientists, became obvious only during the final stages of the experiment. After conducting thorough analysis of acquired data, they discovered that not only does the Universe expand, but time tends to accelerate as well."

Because the concept is so new, and because it is untested by the rest of the scientific world, the story said it may take another 30 years before the effects of Stary and Soldatenko's work are really known.

But if they are proven to be right, the story said the results could "turn our preconceived notions of the Universe upside down."

One thing I can say is that they didnt need to go to all of that trouble to determine that time is running faster than it used to. All they needed to do was ask their grandparents. They already knew it.