I guess it is predictable that a geriatrician should have a heightened curiosity about time. I have spent my entire professional career ministering to old folks. Such devotion inevitably heightens an awareness of the role that time plays in the affairs of mankind.
My scientific curiosity has generated papers such as "The Physics of Frailty" and "Aging as Entropy". They have caste me in the company of physicists which is a strange fraternity for a physician. Most MDs are uncomfortable in their midst, but I have concluded that for a deep comprehension of health, particularly aging, Medicine should get cozier with physics, particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is Greek to most MDs.
My travels have taken me to Austin, Texas where I communed with one of my science heroes, Ilya Prigogine. He won the 1977 Nobel Prize for his work on the Second Law. He coined the phrase " dissipative structure" to describe life. His book "Order out of Chaos" was one of my most brilliant "Eurekas!"
When we met I had the opportunity to tell him about my musings about aging, and he immediately revealed his struggles to understand time. Ever since Einstein introduced relativity our deep understanding of time has trembled. Newtonian physics required huge amendment. Time was not absolute but relative.
Prigogine died from kidney failure before any closure. But even Einstein had problems with time because he failed to grasp its directionality, "the arrow of time" must be reckoned with.
For most of the physical world reversibility of the descriptive equations is the rule. But not with biology, LIFE, where irreversibility rules. Reincarnation awaits any experimental validation.
In my effort to generate a workable inclusion of time within the rubric of human health. I have proposed the metrics of health span, health space, and health pace. Health span is 100 years, health space displays a 70 % redundancy of function, health pace is a gentle ½% per year decrement, secondary to an assortment of entropic processes such as free radical damage.
Such metrics therefore provide a conceptual mathematization of health. In Science measurability ranks high. Someone cleverly observed that time is the universal solvent into which all things dissolve. Just how true such an axiom is I will have the chance to explore next week in Boston where the National Science Foundation is bringing together a small group of like-interested folk for a workshop on "Aging and Failure in Biological, Physical, and Engineered Systems."
I will report back on the solvencies of any new conclusions.
As we age another truism emerges "Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end it gets, the faster it goes".
I relate powerfully to that thought.