Blogging A-Z: E is for… End of Time

End of Time

I was watching one of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole episodes the other day, and the subject of the documentary was time, or to be more specific, if ‘time’ existed. It discussed a series of concepts, including the theory of relativity, an experiment which manipulated light, slowing it down by a nano-second as it passed through a machine as well as discussing how the concept of ‘time’ was discovered.

It was all rather technical (for me), but very interesting, and it got me thinking about the end of time.

We measure our days (and nights) by the rise of the sun, by the turn of light and darkness. At some point in history, the twenty-four hour day was decided upon, and that is what we live our lives by, along with the concept of weeks, months, and what constitutes a year. These measurements have come about from the study of the sunrise, the stars in our skies and the change in our seasons.

Time is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future regarded as a whole‘ (Oxford Dictionary).

So what happens when ‘time’ grinds to a halt?

As with other themes, I always find it interesting to hear different authors perspectives and found a few books I thought worthy of  mention, although I’ve not personally read any of these:

Stolen time:

Thief of Time (Discworld) by Terry Pratchett

Splintering Time:

Time Quake (for ages 10-14 ) by Linda Buckly-Archer

Ecological Damage:

Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter

Fifth element

City at the end of time by Greg Bear

**Actually, I struggled to find independently published books tackling this theme. There were a lot of books in the Kindle store, but when reading synopsis’ the focus seemed to on religion, while I was looking for books fictionalising the science of the end of time.**