Two views of times兩種時間觀念

Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house.Each day of the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room,undressed and took up the same positioning in front of a motion picture camera.It photographed one frame of you per day,every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday,the reel of film was shown.You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour(27.4minutes at sixteen frames per second). Images of this sort ,though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar but useful perspectives of time. They may ,for example ,symbolize the telescoped ,almost momentary charater of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disaffected individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable brevity of our lifes in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos were shorted to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.

設想你在同一間房子裡度過了一生。每天在同一時刻，你進入一間人工照明的房間，脫去衣服，在攝影機前擺同一姿勢。在你一生所有的日子裡，攝影機每天給你拍下一個鏡頭。在你72歲生日那天，放映這部影片。不到半個小時（每秒16個鏡頭，總共27.4分鐘），你就看完了自己在72年裡的“興衰”。這樣的圖像儘管讓人懼怕，卻能向我們說明那陌生而有用的時間概念。比方說，它們可能象徵著轉瞬即逝的過去的縮影，如同在一個憂心忡忡或憤憤不平的人眼中所見的那樣。或者它們可能說明了在宇宙的時間裡，我們生命的異常短暫。如果將宇宙的估計年齡縮短到72年，人的一生可能只有10秒鐘。

But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the mumber of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos, A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.

但是從另一個角度看時間，每天都有86, 000多秒的小永恆。每一秒鐘，人體內所進行的不同的分子作用的次數可與宇宙估計年齡中的秒鐘數相比。幾秒鐘的時間已足夠醞釀一場革命、進行一次驚人的溝通、孕育一個嬰孩、製造一次傷人的侮辱、造成一起突然死亡事件。我們的壽命可以是無限長久，也可以是權其短暫，這取決於我們怎麼看待這一切。