The world is changing. We don’t ride horses to market, we abolished slavery, and we lean on instant messaging. Today, I noticed an extraordinary change. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that constantly updates itself through user contributions and edits, brings to the world a wide range of topics from experts and topic aficionados.

Look up time perception on Wikipedia. You will see a textbook to study, with 9,555 words to read, including 124 citations. In time, corrections will dominate the belief-whims to get to the farthest reaches of truth. With each passing day, Wikipedia pages get longer and more precise, but we still have a long way to go before we can rely on it for proper research.

Bear with me when I say, yes, get the Wiki app and explore its contents for foot-in-the-door connections, but don’t rely on it for professional analysis. With that, consider the old question as an example: Why do we think time is speeding up with age? The familiar answer is usually that the perception of time is just the percentage of the years passed.

In this posting, I sift through 200 years of philosophizing time to bring out a simple, expert view of how to understand time. For a complete understanding, my book The Clock Mirage, which is not in one of the 124 citations on the Wikipedia site, will give a comprehensive picture of what we know about time.

A year to a 5-year-old girl would be one-fifth of her life (20 percent), while that year to a 25-year-old would........

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