Are We There Yet?

It seems as if the time to the Inauguration and new administration is moving verrryyyy slowly. It may be that time is moving slower than normal anyway (see yesterday's blog about the extra second as one example). But it seems to be an inordinately long time since election night. And a long time yet to go until January 20.

It may be the waiting. Waiting (for a Christmas morning for example) lengthens the time until the big event. It's a well established scientific fact that a watched pot never boils. That's because we are there waiting for it to boil. But turn away for a second - let your mind drift to one, microsecond's worth of an alternative thought - then the water will boil away. With or without you.

I saw proof of this once on Star Trek: The Next Generation when the android, Data, was watching the same amount of water boil time and time again only to find that it boiled in the same amount of time each event. Seemingly disproving the watched pot never boiling maxim. But Data was an android. His mind was an errorless, perfect computer. No mind-drifting to vary the time it takes. No random thoughts to allow the experiment to alter.

In quantum physics, there's a theory called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It more or less says that you can't observe something without changing it. Maybe the Inauguration won't come if we keep waiting for it anxiously: observing time's passage as we await the change. Maybe the change won't happen at all unless we stop anticipating it. Like the pot of water. Time will just go on infinitely more and more slowly. Adding not only seconds each day. But minutes. Hours. Years. Eons.

And we'll never make it to January 20. George W. Bush will be President for eternity!