Time dilation by Taylor L. '29

Every roommate I’ve lived with quickly discovers my hidden superpower: I am invulnerable to alarms in the morning, no matter how loud or obnoxious. If I wake up, it’s not because of a clock, but instead purely through the strength of hopes, dreams, affirmations, and prayers.

Accordingly, my Kryptonite is waking up super early (before 11am). I don’t even want to admit how many first period tardies I had in my senior year of high school. Suffice to say, punctuality has never been my strong suit.

My saving grace for the past few weeks has been MIT time. Every class starts five minutes after its posted time and ends five minutes before (ex: a 9am class begins at 9:05 and ends at 9:55). In theory, this is supposed to give you a ten-minute buffer if you have consecutive classes. Do I have any consecutive classes? No. Am I riding the coattails of everybody who has to sprint from Sloan ⁠01 business school to the end of the Infinite ⁠02 long (~1/6th of a mile) hallway that cuts through the main academic building twice a week? Of course I am.

I’ve been in 8.01 (Physics: Classical Mechanics) for two weeks now (and I haven’t been late at all, thanks to MIT time). Like most things here, the class moves quickly. But out of everything I’ve learned so far, the idea of reference frames has especially stuck with me: things look different depending on your perspective.

Taken to its extreme, reference frames lead to a phenomenon called time dilation, in which, paradoxically, time passes slower the faster that you’re moving (thanks Einstein!). I couldn’t explain the math behind it to you yet, but I can definitely say that stepping into MIT feels like stepping into a physics problem on time dilation.

It’s very easy to feel windswept here. I’ve started to use Google Calendar for the first time, and now there’s a ton of colorful rectangles demanding I be at this place, at this time, to do this certain thing. It’s a rewarding type of busyness ⁠03 I like Google’s definition of busyness: 'the state or condition of having a great deal to do' and I’ve never learned so much in such a short time before, but it nonetheless requires an adjustment to a faster-paced day.

There’s still a ton of small little breaks in the continuum here, though: physics assignments are due at 11:00 instead of 11:59 so I stress out at 10:59 instead and can spend the next hour relaxing, and I stand in a very long line to get stir fry at New Vassar during lunch, and I get ten minutes between classes to take a nice stroll through the Outfinite ⁠04 the outdoor counterpart of the Infinite to enjoy the not-cold Boston weather while it lasts.

It’s in those moments of stillness where I feel super time-dilated, where I stop and think for a second and look back at how much has passed in what seems like an instant. I spent this past summer soaking in the last dregs of my hometown before leaving it to see the rest of the whole wide world, and those three months spent in my comfort zone feel just as packed as my first month at MIT. Every moment has been so full.

I’m still in that awkward middle phase where my poorly-decorated room and my walk to class and the new friends I’ve met all feel familiar one second and foreign the next. I do wonder, sometimes, how long I have before the weather gets colder, the novelties wear off, and it all becomes business as usual.

It’s nice to have that Gcal, then, as some sort of structure, a map to follow in case I remember that I moved away from the only home I’ve had in my eighteen years. But some of my fondest memories so far have been made outside of those colorful rectangles. It’s the simple, slow, or spontaneous things, like watching Sunday football on the third floor of Maseeh (go Panthers!), or the weekly The Summer I Turned Pretty ⁠05 all good things must come to an end, which is why there’s still a movie on the way debrief in the lounge right outside my door, or even waking up to the sun shining through my window on days where my first class is a 10(:05)am.

I shouldn’t have to mention that time moves fast here, but it also moves slow, and I’ve found that the whitespaces of my calendar are just as full as the little colorful blocks.