If you've seen my website or gotten an email from me - you may have noticed that I refer to myself occasionally as the Master of Space and Time. It's a bit of a joke based on a very vivid dream I once had. "Ha ha, funny funny - can you get me more vacation time?"
Lately, though, I've begun to have concerns.
The clock in my office (incidentally, it's supposed to be going backward - that's the point), has been steadily slowing down. It loses about 3 minutes a day. Not a good thing when I use it to determine how much longer I have to be at work. Dead battery, right?
Web pages, on our local server, are very slow. Development machines - even slower. Off campus servers and pages - nanoseconds. We just need better equipment, right?
Router upgrade for our network - my computer was the only one to desync and slow down - coincidence, right?
People behind me in line get their food first. Traffic lights come up red more frequently than averages would suggest. Slow drivers are nearly always in front of me on the road.
Paranoia, right? Unless...what if it's all my fault? What if time is slowing down around me? Am I some kind of quasi-spacial black hole? Drawing in slowness from all corners of the globe?
(note: Isn't a globe, pretty much by definition, spherical? Hence, no corners?)
The problem with tracking this is a question of scale - all my measurement tools would be affected as well. You don't want to know what's happened to the clock in the bathroom. All temporal laws go out the window on that one. And we don't have a window in the bathroom.
Maybe if I can rent some satellite time - get an independent observation. Hopefully, the effect doesn't extend beyond the atmosphere. I'd hate to be slowing down the whole planet.
On the bbbbriiightttt ssssside at least it isn'ttttt slowwwwwwwwwinggggg doooowwwwnnn mmmmyyyy typinnnggggg.
