The Bulletin calculates that (with the frightening Trump presidency partially to blame) we are now just two and a half minutes away from Doomsday.

Back to the Doomsday Clock's alarmingly relentless tick-tockery in just a few fleeting moments.

Coincidentally, as we are given this good reason to think about clocks and about the passage of time a brand-new book about time is attracting oodles of attention and debate. It is Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by New Yorker science writer and confessed "time enthusiast" Alan Burdick.

Time, what on earth it is and how it works is a huge and everlasting subject for scientists, philosophers and psychologists. The two greatest physicists in history, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, had diametric views of how time works.

Physics seems to have decided this argument in Einstein's favour but when it comes to psychological time, one of Burdick's core themes, matters remain contentious and mysterious.

Burdick and his wife Susan were blessed with twin boys. Of course a spell of busy domestic turmoil ensued.

"When after many months Susan [his wife] and I at last regained the ability to reflect," Burdick writes, "we found ourselves saying both 'Time stood still' and 'Time flew,' and each statement felt equally true."

And so some of his book is a meditation on psychological time. The latter is measured by us with our "internal clocks".

All of us notice the mysterious ways in which time can seem to sprint or dawdle, depending on where are, what we are doing and what we are feeling.

For me the three hours of a game of American Football seems to last as long as the Howard Years (and those years, while we were enduring them, seemed to take as long as geology's Palaeozoic Era of 290 million years). By contrast three hours engrossed in a ripper novel by a favourite author hurtles by in 10 minutes, with us so engrossed we miss the aggrieved dog's dinner time. Our weekend of play down the coast seems over in five minutes while our week of unavoidable business in, say, Barnaby Joyce's tedious Armidale, seems to take for ever and a day.

Burdick's stimulating book and the stimulating discussions it is spawning about psychological time has me asking myself, and especially you dear reader, about Canberra's pace. Does this feels to you like a place where time flies by or a place where time only ever strolls (or even stands still)?

There are cities (Glasgow, Shanghai and Melbourne leap to my well-travelled mind) where time seems to gallop. But for me Canberra is a city where time tends to stand still. Two and a half Canberra minutes can seem to linger for weeks. A life lived here may seem to take a very long time.

Why is Canberra so?

One factor is that the city is an insignificant metropolitan pimple on the vast, ancient immensity of the landscape. Our city takes its character from geological time. The oldest rocks exposed in Canberra (the sandstone of dear old Black Mountain) are older than the Middle Ordovician. One could have sworn that the Howard Years took as long as the Middle Ordovician but that's psychological time playing with our minds because the Middle Ordovician lasted from 470 million to 458.4 million years ago.

Then, too, there is a kind of hard-to-define Ordovician uneventfulness about Canberra public life that adds to this sense of time never getting a wriggle on. For example the way in which our do-nothing, stand-for-nothing members of the federal parliament and of the Assembly have such geologically long, uneventful careers contributes to the sense that nothing is happening here.

Reclusive, pre-selected for life Gai Brodtmann seems to have been my member of federal parliament since the Menzies' era. Zed Seselja's federal parliamentary career will last for dreary decades as measured by clocks but in psychological time will feel to Canberrans like the long wait for Hell to freeze.

But back to the Doomsday Clock.

This adjustment of the clock's hands is alarming but in his online response, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Doomsday Clock, Alexander Tesar asks us to calm down.

He argues that "the idea that we are edging closer to oblivion" may be "just another example of humanity's ongoing obsession with Armageddon".

"Most of the world's major religions began as doomsday cults…"

"[And] despite the gloomy implications, there is a silver lining: the Doomsday Clock does not behave like a regular clock. The hands do not move inexorably forward, forever inching towards our collective death; they have frequently turned the other way, as the perceived risks are dealt with through regime change, international treaties … "

"The present may be a frightening place, but some clocks really can be turned back."

Religious Canberrans! Forgive Tesar's unkind (but true) observation that your faiths began as just doomsday cults and in tonight's prayers pray urgently for regime change (perhaps through God's divine intervention of impeachment) in the USA.