You're never caught more off guard than when you're asked simple questions. Do you Love me?, Did you just look at my sister's ass?, Do I look fat? They seem to be questions impossible to reply to right as the other expects, yet one develops strategies to avoid, neutralize or, in a desperate act, reply with honesty. It is totally different when you face simple, and you don't even have the postal code where to reply to... And there is the issue, the beginning. When you cannot even find the tip of the gigantic iceberg to attempt to respond.

The greased pig of my younger ages was: What is Time?, and after shuffling several possibilities in my teenager's head, recursive and odd thoughts just as "time is time", what I found out is, that I had no idea, but I wasn't the only one.

As any worthy adventure, this one started hacking the reed with a machete, the reeds that join philosophy, religion and science (physics, in this case), what I can clearly recall is the wet socks and bugs (?).

This time, the first hint for a truth was offered by religion. When the shock I had of being close to such a dangerous phenomenon started fading away... I found a sketch of a response and two options, one more beautiful than the other, yet mutually excluding. It seems that religion, just like science, does not like ménage à trois; so a merge of science, me and religion was a HUGE no.

Then, religion displayed two notions of time. In this corner, lineal time, Judeochristian time: from A to B, stopping everywhere yet never passing again by the same places; in the other corner, the Wheel of Time, cyclic repetitions, the beginning that comes after an end, the Greek, Babylonian, hindi, Budist, native american structure. With Tambourines and orange clothes.

Tired of dichotomy, I seeked for shelter in science, Physics came to me and explained, rough, aggressively, slapping the ideas into my head, that: " 'maybe' the time line is finite", or physics just wanted to troll me, because it seems that physics also had two different concepts for the universe and the way it moves; this time, in a time that always moves forward... With a Universe that moves as it pleases..

We've all heard about the Big Bang (watch out when googling that term... It looks like it's also used for porn), the initial explosion around 13700 million years ago, suspicious of being responsible for the star's displacement in space (I love you Doppler effect).

Now, even when a majority of the scientific community was happy about the principles based on the Big Bang, some imagined a Universe that would expand infinitely, others, that it'd expand until reaching a certain point and then recede.

Sean Carroll, a rock start of physics (like Elvis Presley but with less female fans), solved the problem by throwing fuel into the fire saying that, basically, multiple universes exist and each one of them expands and cools down, to later be reborn into a new Big Bang. A cycle that is not cyclic, a time that moves forward... And yet, we're so confused.

Sick of the doubt, I tried the last station: philosophy, the jam of whom did not find sweet neither at religion or science. The good thing about this time is that there was not two opposite theories (and this is not a philosophic trick, when I'll end up saying that there actually WAS another theory; not by any chance).

OK, yes, there was two facing ideas.

This time, the Red Sea split to the side of Sir Isaac, strong curly haired Gladiator, that established time as something "real", tangible permanent and true. With a true physic's axis, objective and even "Einsteinish" (a bit rough, after the genius spent a night at the bar).

On the other team, stretching and already shirtless, Kant and Liebnitz, that preferred to take an "orange clothes" team uniform with the idea of a subjective time, internal impossible to exist without the human perspective, a tree that only makes noise when we are there to listen to it.

Physics gave her heart and soul to Sir Isaac so time was and is real for her, but biology (since she's silly, naive and romantic... that's why we love her), decided that she should accept both and understood that there's external, objective and real times; and internal and subjective ones. So, now people have a scientist that gives viagra to a hamster to better understand how is time born, grown and spends... "time" in us.

Grab a question, strike it with several disciplines, find absolute, partial, patched, magic, logic, physic answers. Write, rewrite, organize, chew down the complexities until it's easier to feel its texture and either swallow or spit it. There I found time.

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