by Charles Hughes

Created on: February 04, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

Time is an abstraction
that's also very real.
It affects how we think
and also how we feel.
It's what makes us angry
when we have to wait
and it also makes us anxious
when we think we're late.
It's not something solid.
You can't hold it in your hand,
but it flows through an hourglass
with each grain of sand.

Time may have always been,
or perhaps it's the reverse.
It may have been created
as was our universe.
Before all time there may have been
some irregularity
that punctured through the nothingness
and became a singularity.
But because there was no space
in which it could exist
it destroyed the nothingness
so that it could persist,
and as it expanded outwards,
sweeping nothingness away,
a part of it became the time
it needed for it to stay.
It was this imbalance
that stopped a conflagration
when matter and antimatter might have joined
in mutual annihilation.
Instead space warped and matter clumped
together in a way
that gave rise to gravity,
and for us another day.

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