Two Views of Time
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.
设想你的整个一生都是在同一间房子里度过的。每天的同一时间，你进入一个人工照明的房间，脱掉衣服，在摄影机前摆出同样的姿势。在你一生的每一天，摄影机都给你拍下一个镜头。在你72岁生日的那一天来放映这部影片。在不到半个小时的时间（每秒16个镜头，总共27.4分钟）里，你将看完72年来你的成长和衰老过程。这类图像，虽然令人震惊，却有助于说明关于时间的陌生而有用的观点。比如说，它们可能象征着近乎瞬间的过去的缩影，就像某个焦虑而不满的人眼里所呈现的那样。或者它们可能说明了在宇宙的时间段里，我们的生命是极其短暂的。如果宇宙的估计年龄被缩短到72年，那么人的生命大概只有10秒钟。
但我们可以从另外一个角度看待时间。每一天都是86,000秒的小小永恒。在每一秒里，人们身体内不同分子相互作用的次数可以比成宇宙估计年龄中的秒数。几秒钟的时间，足以产生一个革命性的念头，足以进行一场惊人的交流，足以促成一个婴儿的孕育，足以造成一个伤人的侮辱，足以使一个人猝然死去。我们的生命可以是无限长，也可以是无限短，关键在于我们如何看待这一切。
我们的生命可以是无限长，也可以是无限短，关键在于我们如何看待这一切。
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