This cartoon was drawn by Trish Dardine. She did all of the illustrations in "500 Key Words for the SAT" and "100 Math Tips for the SAT". Trish can be reached at http://www.finetoons.com.
According to many sources, Albert Einstein once said the following:
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
I’m far from an expert on relativity, despite the many books I have read (or tried to read) on the subject, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with this quote. It seems too simplistic. It says that our perception of time is completely subjective, and varies depending on our emotional state. That doesn’t come close to explaining relativity. But I’ve never been able to find any concrete evidence that he didn’t say it. I’ve never even found anyone else who questioned the quote’s origin, or its usefulness as an analogy. So maybe I’m still not getting it.
However, I completely agree with the quote’s main idea: that time seems to slow down or speed up, depending on what we’re doing. Looking a little more deeply, I think what affects our perception of time — or at least mine — is how much we’re paying attention to it.
Back to the stove. When I cook spaghetti and think, “it needs another minute,” I usually stand there and watch the clock. I’m always amazed at how long it takes for sixty seconds to go by. Yet when I drive on a boring stretch of highway, or when I’m watching a good movie or involved in an interesting conversation, the minutes and hours seem to evaporate. On those rare nights when I sleep straight through, eight hours can feel like eight minutes. So the Einstein quote is absolutely accurate, whether he said it or not.
If waiting for the stove’s clock to tick off a single minute can take so long, why do the weeks seem to fly by? I think it must be because I’m not paying enough attention. A week has more than ten thousand of those minutes. What if I could train myself to focus on more of them, and be aware of what each one contains? At home, the weeks are like speeding cars zipping past me while I stand on the edge of an eight-lane highway. On any given day, I can’t remember what I did yesterday, or if something happened last Tuesday or three months ago. But sometimes, especially on a trip to a new place, one day can be so filled with experiences that twenty-four hours can feel like a week. On vacation I often find myself thinking, at the end of the first day, “I can’t believe I was home this morning.” Those must be the days when I’m paying attention, when a day feels like a day.
What if I could learn how to do that more often? I’d have more experiences and more memories to mentally attach to each minute. Time would seem to slow down, and I’d have more of it.
I think I’ll go sit on a hot stove and start practicing.
Mostly Bright Ideas 
Marie M
May 27, 2010
I’m pretty sure your final line does not rank among your brightest ideas. If there are a lot of things going on, we generally can’t attend too closely to the moment. (There’s that concept of “attention” again.) I don’t imagine you would be able to immerse yourself in the hot stove experience long enough to “appreciate” it (one understanding of “appreciate”: from ad + pretium = toward the price/value), as you would have to hop off it a lot faster than you sat on it! I would like to read, though, your projection of the experience–what you would think and feel were you really to sit on that hot stove. For even a second.
SO you might consider simply slowing down, or even stopping, everything you do (with the exception of breathing) for a few minutes. Of course that’s the technique used in so many meditation programs–strip away as much thought and action as possible, and simply be. In my limited experience, sometimes an interesting contradiction occurs: the time spent meditating can feel either very long or very short. Perception again? Perhaps.
“Time isn’t a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell.” Sue Monk Kidd in When the Heart Waits
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bronxboy55
May 27, 2010
I remember taking my son to see the first Pokemon movie. The running time was supposed to be 75 minutes, but it was eleven and a half hours. I’m not exaggerating. I asked the other parents who were there, and they agreed.
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Marie M
May 27, 2010
LOL! Boy, that should have been the best night’s sleep you ever got! (We’ve been subjected to Pokemon movies in this household, too [yawn.])
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Amiable Amiable
May 27, 2010
My husband got big points for taking the boys to the first Pokemon movie, a.k.a. his first Rip Van Winkle experience. When he woke up, he caught the last few credits for Spider-Man 3. When my family asks me what I want for my birthday, Christmas, or Mother’s Day, I always ask for the gift of time. The time spent raising my children has gone by so quickly. Why can’t time spent with the relatives move at the same lightening speed?
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Mitch
May 28, 2010
As you talk about relativity here, I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek: TNG, when Data kept watching a pot of boiling water and noticing that it always started boiling at the same point, even though he’s heard that a watched pot never boils. The truth is that most of us have no real sense of time, and thus sometimes it seems like things are taking longer to get through, and at other times it seems like time is speeding by.
I notice that time seems to slow down when I’m paying more attention to it. Problem is, it’s hard these days to pay attention to time as much because there’s so many distractions. I think that’s the issue with getting older; we have so much going on that it’s hard to stay in the moment.
But I’m not giving up trying, that’s for sure.
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Charles Gulotta
May 28, 2010
I read on your blog that you recently started working out. Have you noticed how time slows way down on the treadmill? And the stairmasters must all be set up right on the edge of a black hole. I can also remember going to baseball games when I was a kid, and how quickly those nine innings went by. More distractions? Looking for the ice cream vendor? It was always over much too soon.
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Mitch
May 28, 2010
Actually Charles, time on a treadmill goes exactly as I expect because it’s one of the few times I’m paying attention to how long I’m on. Even if I’m listening to music or watching TV while on it, time is quite precise.
But you mentioned going to a ball game, and there I’ll join you. Went a few nights ago because this kid Strasberg that everyone’s been talking about was pitching. The game went along fast most of the time, but when he was in trouble it slowed down some. And I had to wait until the 6th inning before the cotton candy guy came; that was murder!
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Charles Gulotta
May 28, 2010
Is that Stephen Strasburg? Where did he end up? I thought he’d signed with the Nationals.
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Meera
July 5, 2010
I picked this post to read first on my maiden voyage through your blog, and it feels serendipitous, given what we were discussing on mine. Maybe language, if we practice using it to isolate and define smaller and smaller parts of our experiences, is another way to slow down time. Your writing here is a part of that practice, I think.
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bronxboy55
July 5, 2010
People who are involved in an accident or some other traumatic event often describe the experience as if they were watching it all happen in slow motion. And that’s the technique film directors frequently use: we see the catastrophe happen very slowly. You’re right, it must have something to do with focusing on the tiniest details. If the mind assumes a certain amount of time is needed for each separate experience, and it perceives each of those experiences in a focused way, then it has to distort its sense of time in order to make sense of it. Or something like that.
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Wyrd Smythe
January 22, 2013
Ol’ Al is one of the most misquoted people ever, but this one he did say. In a series of recorded sessions with someone named William Hermanns he offered an expanded version, “To simplify the concept of relativity, I always use the following example: if you sit with a girl on a garden bench and the moon is shining, then for you the hour will be a minute. However, if you sit on a hot stove, the minute will be an hour.”
Unfortunately (and hence your confusion), it has nothing to do with actual time effects due to relativity. Your emotional perception of time (which can be all over the map), has nothing to do with it. [If you really want to know about relativity, I’m planning a series of posts about it for his birthday in March.]
Have you ever noticed that, when you’re driving to a new destination and following directions, the trip seems to take “X” amount of time. But when you return home, now knowing the way, the trip seems much shorter? That has to do with your attention and awareness. The more attention you pay, the slower time seems to pass. That’s why that 60 seconds in the kitchen takes forever.
There is also an aging effect. When you’re ten, one year is 10% of your life! That’s huge. When you’re 55, one year is just 1.8% of your life. They go by “faster” because they are “smaller.”
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bronxboy55
January 28, 2013
I understand the subjective perception of time, and experience it many times a day. It’s just such an incomplete explanation that I have to wonder if Professor Einstein thought that was all the average person was capable of comprehending.
Among many of the books on relativity that I own and have read is Relativity, The Special and the General Theory, written by Einstein himself. The subtitle is “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Here he has overestimated our abilities, or at least mine. I couldn’t make it past page 12.
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Wyrd Smythe
January 29, 2013
Understanding why and how speed and gravity affect time is a huge leap from understanding that perception of time changes, and I suspect you’re right that he knew any real explanation would befuddle more than illuminate.
His metaphor badly misses the reality (has no connection to it, really), but it does serve to point out that time can (appear to) move differently for the same person depending on circumstances. That part is correct (even if the reason is wrong).
A problem with relativity and quantum physics for non-scientists is that so much of it has no basis in daily experience. The wave-particle duality, time dilation and other relativistic effects… not something we run into. Ever.
On the other hand, without GR, your GPS wouldn’t work.
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