Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

We think that there's a past, a present, and a future.

I don't believe there are any, that there's only the eternal now.

I remember when I was studying physics in college, the professor gave us this conundrum.

He said, there's a big locomotive, a hundred ton, you know, a hundred ton locomotive barreling along a track, you know, going from east to west at 80 miles an hour.

And going from west to east is a mosquito going at two miles an hour.

And they crash.

You know, now in mathematics, you can't go in this direction and reverse yourself without temporarily coming to a complete stop.

You can't go from a positive speed east to west and then reverse yourself going west to east and

were all coming instantaneously to a stop.

So presumably the stop happened when the mosquito hit the train.

Now, if the mosquito stopped when it hit the train, the train must have stopped when it hit the mosquito.

There must have been a moment where there was no movement whatsoever, the moment of impact.

And therefore, the train meeting a whole bunch of mosquitoes is just jumping along in increments.

Now, there's a solution that obviously is the kind of conservation of momentum, but it got us thinking.

And what I took from it, in some senses, there's this splink of time between the past and the future, between going from east to west and going from west to east, when there's just a total now.

And we live totally just in those moments.

And then we string them together and we create the notion of time, a past, a present and a future.

And basically, it's our effort to try to deal with the notion of change or evolution.

There'd be no need for time, you know, if we weren't trying to measure change or evolution.

So we've devised this thing to try to measure evolution and change and growth.