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The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality?
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I recommend reading the book; The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, numerous people have reported that they don't feel depressed or (as depressed/anxious) after reading it.
Here's a link to buy it on amazon
You'll love it. The book that opened my eyes most was actually this one. It made me realize how far we've come in understanding how the world works from a physics perspective. It reads very well, read some of the reviews.
Pretty much everything that passes by. I love learning new things and expand my knowledge, but here are my biggest passions:
-Music: I'm studying to become a composer and music has been a major part of my life since birth, as I was born into a musical family. It's such a joy when I find a new band or composer and start going through their works and discover many new, exciting works. It's even better when you analyse scores and play then on piano, and everything starts to make sense, the melodies, harmonic structure,... sometimes it gives you the same feeling as when you open your christmas present, except you have been given an insight into a mind of a musical genius from the past.
-Lore: A lot of times I pick up a new game/book/TV series/movie, if I really like it, I go and read as much background lore as possible. The extra information and insight behind the main plot is really interesting to read and I tend to memorize unhealthy amounts of useless information :) So far it spans through Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Warhammer 40k, Elder Scrolls, and probably a few more I forgot.
-History: It's real life lore :) Big emphasis on Roman empire/Viking culture/WW2.
-Philosophy: Basically discussing everything ranging from old philosophical problems to problems and dilemmas of the today's world.
-Physics: I love reading about space, black holes, wave-particle duality, electricity,... The more experimental it is, the better. I highly recommend this book.
-Motorsports: Rally and F1 mostly, but I love to drive and I am always blown away by the skills these drivers have. Also, the tech behind the cars is amazing and very interesting.
But the best part is if I can explain the above things to somebody else. It's really one of my favorite things to do. I really like to share my enthusiasm with other people and I can go on for hours at the time :)
Some of my favorites:
Brian Greene -- The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Elegant Universe, and The Hidden Reality. Greene is, to my mind, very similar to Hawking in his ability to take complex subjects and make them understandable for the physics layman.
Hawking -- I see you've read A Brief History of Time, but Hawking has a couple of other books that are great. The Grand Design, The Universe in a Nutshell, and A Briefer History of Time.
Same thing applies to Brian Cox. Here's his Amazon page.
Leonard Susskind -- The Black Hole Wars. Here's the basic idea behind this book. One of the basic tenets of physics is that "information" is never lost. Stephen Hawking delivered a presentation that apparently showed that when matter falls into a black hole, information is lost. This set the physics world on edge. Susskind (and his partner Gerard T'Hooft) set out to prove Hawking wrong. Spoilers: they do so. And in doing so, they apparently proved that what we see as 3 dimensions is probably similar to those 2-D stickers that project a hologram. It's called the Holographic Principle.
Lee Smolin -- The Trouble with Physics. If you read the aforementioned books and/or keep up with physics through pop science sources, you'll probably recognize that string theory is pretty dang popular. Smolin's book is a criticism of string theory. He's also got a book that's on my to-read list called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.
Joao Magueijo -- Faster Than the Speed of Light. This is another physics book that cuts against the prevailing academic grain. Physics says that the speed of light is a universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Magueijo's book is about his theory that the speed of light is, itself, variable, and it's been different speeds at different times in the universe's history. You may not end up agreeing with Magueijo, but the guy is smart, he's cocky, and he writes well.
Dr Brian Greene is a top physicist https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205/ref=nodl_
the fabric of the cosmos by brian greene.
this is the book that got me into the subject when i was a kid. it builds understanding with terms that are understandable and then builds from there.
https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205
and dont worry, if i opened a paper from anything other than my own specific niche id be just as lost!
.... that said, i dont have a better answer than a five hundred page book. its not a simple topic!
My favorite book of Brian Greene is The Fabric of the Cosmos because he explains things so simply. Also, yay science!
OK so I see where you're coming from on this. I am an honest to god Scientist - albeit the biology, not cosmological space/time physics kind, but I'm also drunk, so here. we. GO!
I too have often wondered what is up with the variable perception of time's passage. I've come to the conclusion that it's totally on our brains, and has nothing to do with time's actual arrow, which is some whole other weird crazy shit that this guy does a fantastic job of talking about in a really accessible way. No, seriously: read that book.
But so our brains are basically taking a bunch of really messy stimuli from fairly imperfect organs and trying to make a functional representation of the world out of them. Your vision isn't perfect and even if it's 20/20 it only functions in a rather limited range of wavelengths; you can't hear anything above or below like fourteen octaves and let's not even get into your sense of smell, because you. smell. bad. And you don't even know it. So anyway your brain has all these half-assed senses sending it limited information and from that information it manages to construct a mildly useful representation of the physical world.
Which in and of itself is fucking mindblowing if you just take a minute to think about it: your eyes are shit, yet your brain can fill in the blanks and show you a film that's made up of a series of still photos. For example.
So to get back to the original idea: Why does time seem variable. I would propose that your brain is gauging the relative passage of time based on external stimuli: If, for example, you're fucking (or being fucked by) the love of your life, well that's a lovely experience that is filled with magnificent endorphins and vibrations and miracles and shit - and physiologically, you'll be presented with a pleasurable experience. Every moment of that experience is pretty mindblowing; it's stimulating all of your (half-assed) senses, and your brain is having a great time. So it doesn't give a shit how long it takes. You don't even notice time, and if you were pressed to describe how long it took, you wouldn't be able to say, but it was probably shorter than you'd have liked.
The flip side of this is when people who have experienced trauma describe it, they discuss how time seems to slow down. Which obviously didn't objectively happen, but their brains perceived that it did.
If you've ever talked to anyone who has ever done psychoactive drugs, the first thing they'll tell you is that time seemed to slow down. In both instances (drugs and trauma) the brain suddenly started processing the information it was given more "slowly."
Anyway, with regard to your experiment. Sorry about all the background.
There's a hell of a lot of confounding variables to polling people on Facebook that would have to be taken into account for a poll like that to be relevant. Especially since most people responding to such a poll would be voluntary participants, which would add a whole nother layer of confounding variables to it.
Basically work sucks, weekends rule. However if you could objectively find out whether groups of people considered particular experiences to be more or less tedious, and then more importantly demonstrate why they all independently found them to be so, you could have something very, very cool.
A good book if you're interested in this sort of thing is "The fabric of the cosmos" by Brian Greene.
This is extremely complex stuff. I can highly recommend reading Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. Or watch the documentary based on the book.
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