Why Time Feels Faster as You Age — Physics vs Perception

Описание: Why does a summer at age ten feel endless, while years in adulthood seem to vanish almost overnight? In his lectures at California Institute of Technology and throughout The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman emphasized a crucial distinction: physics describes time as a measurable dimension—uniform, indifferent, woven into spacetime—while human experience of time is shaped by memory, attention, and change.
In physics, whether in Newton’s framework or Einstein’s relativity, time does not “speed up” with age. Clocks tick according to physical law, not emotion. Yet our perception depends on how many new events we encode and how richly we process them. When experiences become routine, fewer mental markers are formed, and retrospectively the interval feels compressed.
Feynman often warned against confusing psychological impressions with physical reality. But he also celebrated curiosity about such differences. If time itself is steady, why does novelty stretch it and repetition shrink it? And what does this reveal about the way our minds construct reality from physical processes?

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