Monday, 15 June 2009

Relativity and running...

I don't know about you but as I get older time seems to go ever faster. This phenomena becomes most noticeable when I'm out running (forget that I'm not running at the moment). I find that as time speeds up, my running speed slows down and I'm sure that one day soon I will be out there running in a forward motion but actually traveling backwards in time. A proposed theory* of this phenomena is thus: The speed of a runner remains constant through life, like the speed of light. As a large mass warps the space around it, giving rise to the effect we call gravitational attraction, so the age of a runner affects the time through which he or she moves. Ask any older person whether time passes faster than it did in youth; what has always been considered a quaint psychological effect is actually a result of age-graded time warp. When I am in a race, I am unquestionably running as fast as ever and also as fast as the runners ahead of me, even though they, being younger than I am, appear to bystanders to be moving faster and will seem to reach the 'finish line' before I do. The raw data for this process has already been tabulated in the WAVA Age-Graded Tables: all that is lacking is for physicists to formulate a theory acceptable to the scientific community. What do you think?

* First proposed and discussed with members of the Dead Runners Society.

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