I have one experience which seems to fall into the area of time dilation. When I was 18, I was out with friends for a very late night though with very little drinking involved, and in the early hours - about 3am - I fell down a manhole, in Hollywood silent-movie style. It was barely any wider than me, and could have been horrific if I hadn't gone 'neatly' through (had I caught my arm I reckon that could have been very nasty), though I still fell about 12ft onto a stone floor in a vault under the pavement. But I remember as I fell thinking this is going to hurt when I hit the bottom, a journey that seemed to take for ever, but which took 0.9 seconds (according to Angio.net's 'splat calculator') with an energy of 2548 joules at the bottom.
The fall seemed to stretch out for seconds, though not long enough for me to do anything; the flipside is that I was still pretty relaxed when I hit the floor and suffered no serious injuries, a few bumps and bruises on my left-hand side and a torn vintage blazer (oh yes!). My father blames the shock of the incident on me developing an allergy to aspirin which manifested itself by nearly killing me a few weeks later.
It was an interesting night all things considered. Early in the evening I got a long, deep cut along the side of one of toes, cutting it on broken glass while skinny-dipping across the river with friends; I still have the scar. As for the manhole, a coach had mounted the pavement and broke it. No barriers were put up, just a piece of wood placed on the pavement that I'd actually moved as I thought it presented a trip hazard! Is that a definition of irony?
Thanks for that.
I can't remember where, but I read a horror novel story once about a guy who found himself kidnapped, removed of his senses of sight and hearing by way of plugs / mask etc., and "strapped to something"; the story went along the lines of him working out by touch he was on a bed, but was suspended "above" something.
The narrative implied to me that at the moment he eventually plunged off / "fell off" the bed, and without really knowing how far he would be falling, was the moment he lost his sanity, even though (from memory) it was only a few feet off the ground. The "fall" in his mind became "timeless"... a concept I've seen in other stories too. I think this one was a Clive Barker short...
I remember a second story too from long agai about the discovery of teleportation and how it only seemed to partially work with living creatures; inanimate objects were fine, but if you pushed a mouse through the sending portal, it arrived dying or dead at the receiving portal. However, it was discovered by chance that it was only the "head" part that was the "problem"... if you pushed a horse, mouse or any animal in "backwards", it was fine (you could "see" the animal emerging in real time at the destination portal), until it reached the head, and where at the other end it was "dead within a few moments".
Eventually, the government (?) allows an experiment with a live person, a condemned criminal if I recall, so that the scientists can try and actually ask him what was "happening" to kill everything;
So he goes through, and when he comes out he's all wide-eyed and clearly gone stark-raving mad... just before he expires, he says that the time he was actually "transferring" wasn't instantaneous, but instead was the equivalent of 100's of years of "nothingness", lived out second by second like a purgatory of sorts... which let's face it, is enough to kill anyone.
If anyone is interested, post here and I'll try and locate the actual authors and stories of these two snippets (and another one which was an episode of "Star Trek: the Next Generation" where Picard undergoes sensory deprivation leading to a stretching of time experience that suddenly comes to mind too).
Oh, reason I was actually posting; in the new FT number 369, August 2018, there's another letter on this thread's subject called "Time Dilation", p74, and is worth a read.
The gang also printed a letter i'd written too on the previous page p73 titled "A load of hot air", if anyone remember's Mat Coward's "useless buttons" article from a while back.
Regards
