Time is a slippery thing for a novelist. Characters make choices, take actions over time. The novelist relies on the sense of time passing to create layers of past and present. So I was somewhat unnerved then when Watching ‘Horizon’ earlier this week to find that time is even more slippery for particle physicist Professor Brian Cox. He claims he has no idea what time really is or what time is it.
Apparently the earth does not reliably take 24 hours to turn on its axis – a strong wind pushing against or getting behind the Himalayas can slow things down or speed them up. And, several million [or was it billion?] years ago a day was a mere 22 hours. Cox says that our experience of feeling the passage of time might just be an illusion. So are we novelist are working a double illusion? Could you create fiction without any sense of time passing – a novel that is just one continuous now?
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