Time and space – memories.

I watched the TV programme presented by Professor Brian Cox in relation to Space/Time.  He pointed out that the Earth in its orbit around the Sun travels at appromately 66,000 miles per hour.  At the same time the Earth is spinning on its axis  at 1,000 miles per hour slowing gradually towards the Poles.  Any sense of motion yet?

Our Solar System takes 225 million years to complete an orbit of our Galaxy.  So it takes the Earth being held by the Suns gravity the same period of time to complete the orbit.  Mathematicians have worked it out that the Sun is travelling through space at an astonishing speed of 483 thousand miles per hour.  So we have three speeds to get our head around.

1. Earth/Sun orbit 66,000 miles per hour.

2. Earths spinning on its axis approximately 1,000 miles per hour.

3. Our Solar System orbit of our Galaxy 225 million years at speed of 483,000 miles per hour.  Confused yet.

So if we think of an event which happened two hours ago across the road we think we are still in the same place where it happened.  We are in one sense but in another we are not.  Still with me?  Since the event happened two hours ago  the Earth in its orbit around the Galaxy has travelled 483,000 x 2 equalling  960,000 miles.  So the memory happened almost 1 million miles away in the past.  Got your head around that?  Yet in another sense you are still sitting fifty yards away from where it actually happened.  Rather confusing.  So when I was eight years old and was standing underneath the wooden bridges which carried the railway across the New Brancepeth road terrified by the screaming of the timbers carrying the weight of the train and the thought of the bridge collapsing on my head that place minus the bridges is still there.  However the earth plus the bridge (still with me?) was the number of hours in seventy years times 483,000 miles  back in its orbit around the Galaxy so that particular event happened billions of miles away in space.

So memories are just not about time but also as Brian Con puts it they are also about Space   The earth stays on its annual orbit around the Sun but the Sun due to gravity is dragging the Earth along with it through its Galactic orbit so where we are now in Space where no one has been before.

Life is complcated.